~ ~ ~

The last time I saw him, though I did not know it would be the last, I was sitting on the terrace with a friend and he came through the gate sweating, his face and chest pink, his hair damp, and stopped politely to talk to us. He crouched on the red-painted concrete or rested on the edge of a slatted wooden bench.

It was a hot day in June. He had been moving his things out of my garage and into the back of a pickup truck. I think he was going to take them to another garage. I remember how flushed his skin was, but I have to imagine his boots, his broad white thighs as he crouched or sat, and the open, friendly expression he must have worn on his face, talking to these women who were not demanding anything of him. I know I was conscious of how my friend and I looked, the two of us sitting with our feet up on our deck chairs, and that in my friend’s presence I might seem even older to him than I was, but also that he might find this attractive. He went into the house to get a drink of water, then came back out and told me he was finished and would be on his way.

A year later, when I thought he had forgotten me altogether, he sent me a poem in French, copied out in his handwriting. There was no letter with the poem, though he addressed it to me, using my name, as though beginning a letter, and closed it with his name, as though closing a letter. At first, when I saw the envelope with his handwriting on it, I thought he might be returning the money he owed me, over $300. I had not forgotten that money because things had changed for me and I needed it. Although the poem was addressed to me from him, I wasn’t sure what he meant to say to me with that poem, or what I was meant to think he was saying, or how he was using it. He had put his return address on the envelope, so I knew he might expect an answer, but I didn’t know how to answer it. I didn’t think I could send another poem, and I didn’t know what kind of letter would answer that poem. After a few weeks had passed, I found a way to answer it, telling him what I thought when I received what he sent, what I thought it was and how I discovered it was not that, how I read it and what I thought he might mean by sending me a poem about absence, death, and rejoining. I wrote all this in the form of a story because that seemed as impersonal as his poem. I included a note saying the story had been hard for me to write. I sent my answer to the address on the envelope, but I didn’t hear from him again. I copied the address into my address book, erasing an earlier one that had not been good for very long. No address of his was good for very long and the paper in my address book where his address is written is thin and soft from being erased so often.

* * *

Another year went by. I was touring in the desert with a friend, not far from the city where he had lived, and I decided to look for him at his last address. The trip had been uncomfortable so far, because I felt oddly estranged from the man I was with. The first night I drank too much, lost my sense of distance in the moonlit landscape, and tried drunkenly to dive into the white hollows of the rocks, which appeared as soft as pillows to me, while he tried to hold me back. The second night I lay on my bed in the motel room drinking Coca-Cola and barely spoke to him. I spent all the next morning on the back of an old horse at the end of a long line of horses, riding slowly up into a single cleft in the hills and down again while he, annoyed with me, drove the rented car from one rock formation to another.

Out of the desert, our relations grew more comfortable again, and as he drove I read aloud to him from a book about Christopher Columbus, but the closer we came to the city, the more preoccupied I was. I stopped reading and looked out the window, but I noticed only isolated pieces of what I saw as we approached the sea: a ravine full of eucalyptus trees descending to the water; a black cormorant sitting on a monolith of pitted white limestone that had weathered into an hourglass shape; a pier with a roller coaster; a cupolaed house high above the rest of the town beside a queen palm; a bridge over railroad tracks that wheeled away ahead of us and behind us. When we headed north toward the city, we went along next to the tracks, sometimes within sight of them and sometimes away from them, when they veered inland and our road continued along the top of the cliff by the water.

I went off by myself the next afternoon and bought a street map. I examined it sitting on a stone wall that was cold under me though the sun was warm. A stranger told me the street I wanted was too far away to reach on foot, but I set off on foot anyway. Every time I came to the top of a hill, I looked out over the water and saw bridges and sailboats. Every time I descended into another small valley, the white houses closed in around me again.

I had not known how large the city would seem to me as I walked or how tired my legs would become. I had not known how the sun on the white housefronts would dazzle me after a time, how it would beat down hour after hour on housefronts that grew whiter and then less white as the hours passed and my eyes began to ache. I got on a bus and rode for a while, and then got off and walked again. Though the sun had shone all day, by late afternoon the shadows were chilly. I passed some hotels. I did not know exactly where I was, though later, when I left the neighborhood, I saw where I had been.

At last, after walking sometimes in the right direction and sometimes in the wrong one, I reached his street. It was the evening rush hour. Men and women in business clothes walked up and down the street past me. The traffic moved slowly. The sun was low and the light on the buildings was dark yellow. I was surprised. I had not imagined that his part of town would look like this. I hadn’t even believed this address existed. But the building was there, three stories high, painted light blue, a little shabby. I studied it from across the street, standing on a step in which was embedded a row of tiles spelling out the name of a pharmacy, though the door behind me opened into a bar.

For more than a year now, since I had written that address in my address book, I had imagined very precisely, as though I had dreamed it, a small sunny street of two-storied yellow houses with people going in and out of them, up and down front stoops, and I had also imagined myself sitting in a car diagonally across the street from his house, watching his front door and his windows. I had seen him coming out of the house, thinking of other things, his head bowed, running down the steps briskly. Or coming more slowly down the steps with his wife, as I had seen him twice before with his wife when he did not know I was watching him, once from a distance as they stood on a sidewalk near a movie theater and once through his apartment window in the rain.

I wasn’t sure I would speak to him, because when I imagined it I was disturbed by the anger I saw in his face. Surprise, then anger, and then dread, because he was afraid of me. His face was blank, and stiff, his eyelids lowered and his head thrown back a little: what was I going to do to him now? And he would move back a step as though that really took him out of my range.

Though I saw that his building existed, I did not believe his apartment would exist. And if his apartment existed, I did not believe I would find his name taped up beside the bell. Now I crossed the street and went inside the same building where he had lived, perhaps very recently, certainly within a year, and read the names ARD and PRUETT on a white card next to the bell of his apartment, number 6.

I realized later that this strange, genderless pair, Ard and Pruett, must have been the ones who discovered whatever he left behind: the bits of tape stuck to things, the paper clips and pins between the floorboards, the pot holders or spice bottles or pot lids behind the stove, the dust and crumbs in the corners of drawers, the hard, stained sponges under the bathtub and under the kitchen sink that he once used in his energetic way to clean a basin or counter, the stray pieces of clothing hanging in dark parts of the closet, fragments of splintered wood, nail holes in the plaster with smudges or scrapes around them or near them that would seem random just because Ard and Pruett wouldn’t know what their purpose had been. I felt an unexpected relation to these two people, though they did not know me and I had never seen them, because they, too, had lived in a sort of intimacy with him. Of course it could have been the tenants before them who found what he left, and maybe Ard and Pruett had found the marks of another person altogether.

Because I had to go as far as I could toward finding him, I rang their bell. If I did not find him this time, I would stop trying. I rang, and rang again, and yet again, but there was no answer. I stood outside on the street just long enough to feel I had arrived, at last, at the final point of some necessary journey.

I had set out to walk to a place that was too far to reach on foot. I had gone on even when it became too late in the day, and when I was at the limit of my strength. Some of my strength had returned when I came near the place where he had lived. Now I walked on past his house, toward Chinatown and the red-light district, the warehouses by the bay, and the water, as I thought, trying to remember the city, and even though he no longer lived in that house, and I was so tired, and I had to go on walking, and there were more hills to climb on all sides of me, I felt calmed by having been there, as I had not felt since he left me, as if, even though he was not there, I had found him again.

Maybe the fact that he wasn’t there made this return possible, and made an end possible. Because if he had been there, everything would have had to continue. I would have had to do something about it, if only to go away and think about it from a great distance. Now I would be able to stop looking for him.

But the moment when I knew I had given up, when I knew I had ended the search, came a little later, as I was sitting in a bookstore in that city, with the taste in my mouth of some cheap, bitter tea brought to me by a stranger.

I had come to rest there, in an old building with floors of creaking wood, a narrow stairway leading downstairs, dim lighting in the basement, and a cleaner and brighter upper level. I had walked through the bookstore, downstairs and back upstairs and around the corner of every bookcase. I sat down to look at a book, but was so tired and thirsty I couldn’t read.

I went to the front counter, next to the door. A somber man in a cardigan sweater stood behind it sorting books into piles. I asked him if there was any water, if I might have a glass of water, though I knew there probably wasn’t any water here, in a bookstore. He said there was no water, but that I could perhaps go to a bar nearby. I said nothing, turned away, and went a few steps up into the front room that overlooked the street. There I sat down again on a chair to rest while people moved quietly around me.

I hadn’t intended to be rude to the man, I simply couldn’t open my mouth and speak. It would have taken all my strength to push the air out of my lungs and make a sound with it, and it would have hurt me to do it, or taken something from me that I couldn’t spare just then.

I opened a book and looked at one page without reading it, then leafed through another book from beginning to end without understanding what I saw. I thought the man behind the counter probably mistook me for a vagrant, since the city was full of vagrants, particularly the sort who would like to sit in a bookstore as the afternoon grew darker and colder, and might ask him for a glass of water, and might even be rude if he did not give it to her. And because I thought, from his expression of surprise, and perhaps concern, when I turned away without answering him, that he mistook me for a vagrant, I suddenly felt I might be what he thought I was. There had been other times when I felt nameless and faceless, walking through city streets at night or in the rain when no one knew where I was, and now this feeling had unexpectedly been confirmed by the man standing across the counter from me. As he looked at me, I floated away from what I thought I was, and became neutral, colorless, without feeling: there was an equal choice between what I thought I was, this tired woman asking him for water, and what he thought I was, and there might not be any such thing as the truth anymore, to bind us together, so that he and I, facing each other across the counter, were more separate than two strangers usually are, isolated as though in a bank of fog, the voices and footsteps near us silenced, a little well of clarity around us, before I, in my new character as vagrant, too tired and disoriented to speak, looked away without answering and went into the next room.

But as I thought this, he walked up to me where I sat close by a tall bookcase. He leaned down to me and gently asked me if I would like a cup of tea, and when he brought it to me I thanked him and drank it. It was strong and hot, though so bitter it parched my tongue.

* * *

This seemed to be the end of the story, and for a while it was also the end of the novel — there was something so final about the bitter cup of tea. Then, although it was still the end of the story, I put it at the beginning of the novel, as if I needed to tell the end first in order to go on and tell the rest. It would have been simpler to begin at the beginning, but the beginning didn’t mean much without what came after, and what came after didn’t mean much without the end. Maybe I did not want to have to choose a place to start, maybe I wanted all the parts of the story to be told at the same time. As Vincent says, I often want more than is possible.

If someone asks me what the novel is about, I say it’s about a lost man, because I don’t know what to say. But it is true that for a long time now I have not known where he is, after first knowing and then not knowing, knowing again and then losing him again. He once lived on the outskirts of a small city a few hundred miles from here. He once worked for his father, a physicist. Now he may be teaching English to foreigners, or teaching writing to businessmen, or managing a hotel. He may be in a different city, or not in a city at all, though a city is more likely than a town. He may still be married. I was told that he and his wife had a daughter and that they named her after a European city.

When I moved to this town five years ago I stopped imagining that he would appear suddenly in front of me, because it was too unlikely. It had not been so unlikely in other places I lived. In at least three cities and two towns, I kept expecting him: if I was walking down a street, I imagined him coming toward me. If I was walking through a museum, I was sure he would be in the next room. Yet I never saw him. He might have been there, in the same street or even the same room, watching me from a short distance. He might have slipped away before I noticed him.

I knew he was alive somewhere, and for several years I lived in a city he would almost surely visit, though my neighborhood was a dirty, run-down area by the harbor. The closer I went to the center of the city, in fact, the more I expected to see him. I would find myself walking behind a familiar figure, broad, muscular, not much taller than I was, with straight, fair hair. But the head would turn and the face would be so unlike his, the forehead wrong, the nose wrong, the cheeks wrong, that it would become ugly just because it could have been his and was not. Or a man would come toward me from a distance with his arrogant, tense bearing. Or, close by, in a crowded subway car, I would see the same pale blue eyes, pink skin with freckles, or high, prominent cheekbones. Once, the features were his but exaggerated, so that the head was like a rubber mask: hair the same color but thicker, eyes so light they were almost white, forehead and cheekbones jutting out grotesquely, red flesh hanging from the bones, lips pressed together as though in a rage, body absurdly wide. Another time, the version of his face was so lacking in definition, so smooth and open, that I easily saw how, in time, it would develop into that other face I had loved so much.

I saw his clothes on many people: of good but coarse material, often threadbare or faded, always clean. And I couldn’t help believing, though I knew it made no sense, that if enough men were to wear these clothes in the same place, he would be forced to appear by a sort of magnetism. Or I imagined that one day I would see a man wearing exactly what he wore, a red plaid lumber jacket, or a light blue flannel shirt, and white painter’s pants, or blue jeans torn at the cuffs, and this man would also have straight reddish-gold hair combed to one side of his broad forehead, blue eyes, prominent cheekbones, tight lips, a broad strong body, a manner that was both shy and arrogant, and the resemblance would be complete, down to the last detail, the pink in the whites of his eyes, or the freckles on his lips, or the chip in his front tooth, as though all his elements had come together and the only thing needed, to change this man into him, was the right word.

* * *

Although I remember it was on a sunny late afternoon in October, on the top floor of a tall public building, I can’t remember the reason for the reception. Surrounded by other people, in a sort of atrium, either circular or octagonal and flooded with sunlight, with doorways opening out from it, I was taken up to him by Mitchell, who told me his name. I forgot his name immediately, as I almost always did when I was introduced to someone. He already knew who I was, so he didn’t forget my name. Mitchell went away, leaving us alone. We stood there in the midst of women moving slowly and tentatively through the rooms singly and in pairs, in and out of the strong sunlight. He told me he had imagined I would be older. I was surprised that he had imagined anything. I was surprised by several things: his frankness, the way he was dressed, in what seemed to me a hiking outfit, and, more than that, the fact that he existed at all, standing here talking to me, since no one had mentioned him to me before. I did not think about him after I left the place, maybe because he was so young.

Later that day, I went up to a shabby café on the coast road to the north of my town where he and a few friends, along with other people I didn’t know, had come to watch a performance of some kind that included primitive tribal chants. When I came in, the room was already darkened except for the spotlights on the stage. The only empty chair I could see at the long table was the one next to him, though a piece of clothing and maybe a purse were hanging from the back of it. When he saw me hesitate over the empty chair, he stood up and removed these things, taking them down to the other end of the table. In fact, another woman came to the chair soon after the performance began, in the dim light, and with irritation walked away to another seat. I don’t know who this woman was.

He was sitting at one end of the table, looking down the length of it, his back to the door I had come in by, and I was sitting to his left, facing a small stage where two men were performing, one chanting and singing, the other plucking a bass fiddle. Across from me was Ellie. I didn’t know her very well then. He kept leaning over to her during the performance, which was so noisy and close to us in the crowded room that no one could talk during it except by speaking directly into another person’s ear.

At that time I liked to drink. I always needed a drink if I was going to sit and talk to someone. If I had to sit in a public place that did not serve alcohol, I was uncomfortable and could not enjoy the time, just as, if I was invited to someone’s house for the evening, I liked to be offered a drink as soon as I walked in.

At the first intermission, I asked him and Ellie if the café served alcohol, and they said it did not. I asked them where I could go to buy something to drink. They said there was a little grocery a short walk away where I could buy beer, and he offered to go with me, and again quickly stood up from his chair.

Outdoors, he walked along beside me over the beaten dirt at the edge of the road, through the litter of dry leaves and wood buttons from the eucalyptus trees.

I can’t remember what we talked about, but in those days I almost never remembered what I had talked about with a person I had just met because I had so many other things on my mind. I was worried not only about whether there was something wrong with my clothes or hair, but also about how I was standing, walking, or holding my head and neck, and where I was putting my feet. And if I was not walking but trying to eat and drink as I talked, I worried about how to swallow the food and drink in such a way that I wouldn’t choke, and sometimes I did choke. All of this kept me so busy that although I remembered a sentence long enough to answer it, I didn’t think about it long enough to remember it later.

The road was dark by the time we went out, at seven-thirty or eight. Or rather, the side of the road where we were walking was lit by streetlights and floodlights around the café and the stores near it, and the other side of the road was dark, lined by eucalyptus trees shading the road from the electric lights. A sign or two hung among the trees, and beyond the trees lay two pairs of railroad tracks, also dark, and across the tracks a small streambed, not visible itself but marked by the tall grasses that bordered it, and then another road, smaller and not much traveled, but well lit, at the foot of a bare hillside. In the other direction, in back of the café and the stores, the ocean was a few hundred yards away at the base of a hill or cliff, so large and dark that even though I couldn’t see it, its darkness hovered over the road and the electric lights fought against it.

I’m not sure whether we walked on dirt or asphalt, what we passed, or how he walked next to me, whether awkwardly or gracefully, quickly or slowly, close to me or a few feet away. I think he was bending toward me in his eagerness to talk and hear what I was saying, which was difficult, since I spoke very quietly. I’m not sure what brand of beer we bought, just what the confusion was about the money and the brand of beer, whether he paid for my beer as well as his own. Maybe I wanted a more expensive brand and bought two bottles of that, while he had only enough money for two bottles of a cheaper brand and spent the last money he had on them. I know he spent his last money on something because much later in the night or the early hours of the morning he ran out of gas and having no money at all, asked a stranger on the street for a dollar. He told this to Ellie in the library the next day and she told it to me, though long after.

There was his invitation, once we were back in the café, my hesitation, his boldness, my misunderstanding, then the noise of his car, my fear, the coast at night, my town at night, my yard and the rosebush, the jade bushes and my fence, my house, my room, the metal chairs, our beer, our conversation, his misstatements of fact, his boldness again, and so forth.

When he asked me to go out for a drink with him, and the first thing I said was that I really should be home working, I felt like a dull translator, or a cautious professor, much older than he was. I had been feeling older and older anyway at that time, maybe because I was in a new place and a new situation, and had to see myself freshly and size myself up as though I was not as familiar to myself as I had thought. I was not really so old, but I was still many years older than he was.

There is more that I don’t like remembering: my hesitation, my sudden worry, my anxiety as I hurried after him, the embarrassment of having run after him, my lack of grace, feeling older but not acting my age, I thought.

He walked with such determined steps out of the café after the performance was over, without saying anything to me, that I thought he was hurt by my hesitation. We had not spoken more than a dozen sentences to each other and already I thought I had hurt his feelings, which isn’t surprising since I often thought he was hurt, and angry, even when I had known him much longer than just a few hours. Of course, the fact that I rushed out after him must have shown how much I wanted to go off somewhere with him, despite my hesitation. When I went out after him he told me he was only removing some things from his car. It was his own awkwardness that had made him leave so abruptly.

As we stood by our cars outside the café, he asked me where we might go. Then, bolder again than I expected, he asked me if we might go to my house. I hesitated again, and this time he apologized. I liked his modesty in doing that. I knew almost nothing about him, so each thing he did and said showed me an entirely new aspect of him, as though he were unfolding in front of me. I did not mind going straight home, because I was tired. I got into my car, and he got into his. I waited for him so that he could follow me, and when he turned on his engine, his large, old, white car roared. It continued to roar so loudly, as it followed just behind me, that my teeth began to chatter and my hands shook on the steering wheel, which I gripped until my knuckles hurt.

With his headlights filling my rearview mirror, and my hands tight on the wheel, we drove down the coast through another town where a movie theater was emptying out, on down by the water, across some marshland, and up a dry hillside into my town, past the traffic lights and the outdoor café on the corner, and after a left turn, up the hill to my house.

It seems to me that he stumbled in the dark as he crossed the rutted dirt driveway under the cedar tree, but I may be confused about that, because I myself fell backward off the bank of sea fig into the driveway a few days later, as he was leaving. I was waving goodbye to him. I did not actually fall, but stumbled back off the high bank in front of the house on which the cedar grew. I was always awkward with him, I had trouble controlling my arms and legs when I walked through the room, when I sat down in a chair. He said I was awkward because I was so eager, and moved too fast for my own body.

Now I walked ahead of him, and by the front wall he lifted a stem of thorns that hung down from an overgrown climbing rose so that I could pass without scratching myself. Or maybe he couldn’t have done this in the dark, and it was on another day, in the daylight. Or it was that night, but the night was not entirely dark. In fact, it is only dark in my memory of that particular night, because I know there were two bright streetlamps nearby: one of them shone into my room.

We made our way across the circular drive and past the untidy rosebush, which grew by the window where I sat so much of the time staring out, and around the side of the house past the jade bushes. We followed a brick path to a gate of white painted wood set in a fence of white painted wood, and through the gate into the arcaded walkway past the windows of my room to the door of my room. An electric light shone from inside a lantern fixed to the white stucco wall next to the door.

Inside, we sat down on two folding metal chairs between the green card table where I worked and a rented upright piano. I brought back from the kitchen two beers, which we drank on the uncomfortably hard chairs.

He told me he had just finished writing a novel, but later this turned out not to be true. What he had just finished was not a novel but a story twenty pages long that he then cut down to six pages. Either I had not heard him right or he was so nervous that he said the word “novel” by mistake and did not hear it.

Because I did not know his name, he seemed only half real, and a stranger to me, though I was not afraid of him. I was startled by him a third time, after a couple of hours had gone by during which we sat talking politely, distantly and carefully about one thing and another, on our separate, hard chairs, when he asked me if he could take his boots off.

* * *

The fact that I must be mistaken about some of this doesn’t bother me. But I’m not sure what to include. There is my hesitation in the café and his persistence. The way I followed him out of the café and back in again. The roar of his car when he started it. The way the headlights and grille of his old white car filled my rearview mirror. The gentleness with which, next to my house, he lifted the strand of rose thorn out of my way so that I would not scratch myself. The hard metal chairs. Then the awkwardness of the bright light by my bed. The way my mind hovered like a little professor in glasses in the air above what was happening down below, and judged this and then judged that.

At dawn, I was asleep, and I woke up because he was saying something to me before he left. I woke up further to understand what he was saying. He was quoting some poetry to me as a way of leaving, and I understood why he was doing it, but it bothered me.

Then there was the roar of his car again when he drove away from my house, disturbing the peace of the wealthy neighborhood. Even if no one could see or hear him, I was embarrassed to have such a young man leave my house at dawn in a car that roared through the stillness of the elegant seaside town, going down the hill past the fenced and hedged properties of my neighbors: the people across the street in their pagoda-style house who owned a large part of the town and who later invited Madeleine and me, along with many others in the town, to a party in celebration of a new acquisition or construction, maybe their swimming pool; the elderly couple down the hill from them whose elaborate cactus garden bordered the small lane that led to the convenience store where I went to buy such things as cigarettes and cat food; the young couple next door to us down the hill in a little white cottage which they did not own but were renting, though I did not know it then, as I did not know that the young woman, who worked in a clothing store down on the main street and sold me something now and then, would be killed on the highway a few years later when a large truck ran into her from behind as she slowed approaching the exit ramp near our town; then past the Norwegian church of dark brown wood, with its line of eucalyptus trees in front, turning right at the bottom of the hill and roaring at a greater and greater distance, until I couldn’t hear it anymore.

* * *

I am close enough to the ocean here, too, so that now and then a seagull flies overhead. There is a creek not far away, so wide I used to call it a river before Vincent corrected me. It flows into a very broad tidal river which Vincent told me should not be called a river either, but an estuary. This village lies on a ridge between the two bodies of water.

But it is a different ocean. And I wouldn’t be able to get to it without passing through miles and miles of the city, because the city is built right out to its shores. There are no sea figs, no jade bushes, and no palms here. The rocks are not sandstone but granite and lime. The soil is not sandy and not reddish but dark brown and loamy.

It is March, and cold. Vincent’s thick cotton socks hang on the line, still damp after several hours in the sunshine. There is an inch of snow on the ground, but some migrating birds have already come back and are singing and looking for nesting spots. Finches flutter around the eaves of the back porch and we track mud into the kitchen.

I have just finished translating a long autobiography written in a difficult style by a French ethnographer. It is a good thing I am done, because the longer I spend on a book, the less money I have. I will send it off to the publisher along with my bill, and wait for my check to arrive.

Earlier today I was reading about a Japanese writer who lives in England and writes in English. His novels are meticulously constructed, have very little plot, and present information in a fragmentary, offhand way. The article seemed important to me for a reason I couldn’t identify, and I intended to save it and reread it, but I have lost the magazine. I am inefficient in the way I work on the novel, and that inefficiency infects other things I try to do. This was more understandable when I had to keep leaving the novel and coming back to it. Now, even though I work on it almost every day, I still become confused and forget what I was doing when I left off the day before. I have to write instructions to myself on little cards with an arrow in front of each. I look for the arrow, read the instruction, follow it, then gradually remember what I was doing and know where I am until I stop for the day, when I write myself another instruction. But on my worst days I just sit here in my nightgown, my own warm smell rising from the opening of my collar. I listen to the cars go by in an endless stream on the road below my window and think something is happening just because time is passing. I won’t get dressed until I have sat here half the day. I won’t always shower first, only at a point when I feel I have thoroughly ripened.

* * *

I used to like to go over every moment of that first evening, when he and I sat there at the table with friends on one side of me, friends on the other side of him, the noise of the performance so loud that no one could talk, when we walked out together, not knowing each other, and bought two bottles of beer each to bring back in, had drunk one bottle each, and had still one bottle unopened in its brown paper bag by our feet, and sat without opening it, saving it for a little while. This seemed to me, in a way, the best moment of all, when it had hardly begun. When we opened the second bottle of beer we would also be opening everything that came after, through the late fall and the winter, but as long as we sat without opening it we were on a sort of island, and all the happiness lay ahead of us, and would not begin until we opened the second bottle of beer. I couldn’t see this at the time, because I didn’t know what was going to follow, but later I could look back and see it.

Looking back at that evening was almost better than experiencing it the first time, because it did not go faster than I could manage it, I did not have to worry about my part, and I was not distracted by doubt, because I knew how it would come out. I relived it so often, it might have happened just so that I could relive it later.

Then, after he left me, the beginning was not only the first, happy occasion, opening into an infinite number of happy occasions, it also contained the end, as though the very air of that room where we sat together, in that public place, where he leaned over, barely knowing me, and whispered to me, were already permeated with the end of it, as though the walls of that room were already made of the end of it.

* * *

I had arrived in town a few weeks before I met him. I had a job but no place to live. I was staying in a tidy apartment belonging to a couple of graduate students who were out of town. I had come there to teach, but I had never taught before and I was frightened. Alone in that apartment I took books down from the bookshelves and read things I thought might help me answer the questions of the students. I imagined that the students would be smart and already know more than I did. But I read so hastily and so randomly that I did not remember anything.

Mitchell was the only person I knew, and he showed me around the city and the nearby towns, walked with me through the campus, answered my questions, and introduced me to people, though he often forgot the names of even his oldest colleagues because of his own shyness. There were two places where he thought I might want to live, a small furnished apartment I would have to myself and an unfurnished room in a large house that I would be sharing with another woman. He took me to see the house first and I never went to see the apartment.

The house was beautiful and nearly empty, the rooms in its two wings opening onto a terrace enclosed by a fence and old shrubs. I thought it was like a Spanish hacienda, though I was not sure what a Spanish hacienda was. The woman lived there with her dog and her kitten. No one knew her very well, but they had formed opinions of her. Mitchell led me through the gate onto the terrace, and the woman, Madeleine, came out of her rooms on the other side of the terrace to meet us. She was tall, with long reddish-blond hair tied back and a wide, tense, unchanging smile on her face, nervous, I could see, about meeting me, so nervous she was almost rigid with fear. It was midday, and the sun shone down on us brilliantly.

Besides the dog and the cat, the only things I saw on that first visit were some electronic equipment and some large unpainted cord pots that Madeleine had made. They were probably standing out in the sun. I never saw the electronic equipment again.

I was nervous, too, at the thought of living with a woman I did not know, whom no one knew very well, in that house with its musty smell of garlic, stale incense, millet, tea, dog, cat, and rug shampoo. Though Madeleine kept her part of the house very clean, it was infested with fleas from the animals. My room had no fleas in it but was covered with a layer of old dirt.

All I had in my room, at first, besides a box spring and mattress which Madeleine and I brought up out of a basement storeroom at the far end of the house, was the contents of my car, what I had brought with me across the country. Then we found, maybe also in the storeroom, the card table and the metal chairs.

Living in the same house together, we continued to act as though we were living alone. We went on talking to ourselves in our separate rooms. From one room, on a bad day, would come the word “shit,” from another the word “bitch.” Or there would be confusion: in the middle of the night Madeleine would remember that a half-finished pie had been left out and get up to put it away, but I had already put it away. She would think she had done it herself and forgotten.

Madeleine did not have the money for either a car or a telephone. I had a telephone installed and rented a piano. When I was out of the house Madeleine would bring into my room the only music she had, a tattered Schirmer’s edition of Chopin’s Nocturnes with rings of coffee stain on its yellow cover, and play the same pieces over and over in a languid style. Often enough, when I came home, I would find her there playing, sitting very straight, and I would be either pleased or irritated, depending on my mood and the state of our relations, which fluctuated constantly. In the evening after supper I would play Haydn sonatas. My style was monotonous, harsh, and mechanical.

But when she played the piano, and played badly, she did it with such grace and dedication that even though I knew her performance was imprecise and romantic, I was still convinced that it was somehow right. Because she did not doubt herself, because she did each thing with such conviction, I always believed her despite myself. I often felt clumsy next to her, or innocent to the point of stupidity. And yet I was not innocent. Later, when he was with us, he seemed even more innocent.

When I moved into the house, it was the dry season, and the skies were slow to grow heavy, slow to rain, letting go only a few drops at a time now and then. I taught one class each day. Driving home by the beaches I would look at the curling waves and think of the first beer I would drink when I got home. I would not eat right away but have a cold beer or a glass of wine. I was too worried about the next day’s class to see anyone in the evening, most evenings. I corrected papers and wrote down ideas for the class. Even after I had gone to bed, I went on teaching in the dark, sometimes for several hours. I expressed things better there in bed than I would the next day.

If I did spend the evening with other people, I liked the wine or beer to be poured freely. I would take off my glasses and put them in my lap, where they kept sliding down onto the floor. At last I would let them lie there, covering them with my bare feet. Outlines softened, features became illegible, and I slowly grew numb. If people around me stopped drinking, I did not like it, because it meant the evening was ending, real life was starting up again, and the next day loomed. I went on drinking alone, though I knew I shouldn’t, since I would have trouble driving the car home, I would not notice stop signs, I would grimace in concentration as the road curved down by the beach and up again over the hills, as I waited out the changing traffic lights in the empty intersections. But it was hard to stop drinking, because in a part of myself I must have believed that if I went on and on, to the point where my fingers lost their coordination, even beyond that to the point where my head drooped to one side and my eyes closed briefly, and even beyond that to where I could speak coherently only by deliberately collecting my thoughts and my words, I would come out the other end into a new condition, into a new world. Looking in the mirror once I was home, I would see that there were small changes: my cheeks were flushed, my hair was limp and disordered, and my lips were pale.

Most of each day, I would sit at my card table and work. My room was very large, with a red tiled floor, a peaked ceiling, dark beams, deep embrasures, white stuccoed walls so thick the air in the room was always cool when the sun was shining and the air outside was hot. If I looked up from my work, I saw dark green pine branches waving slowly against the sky, a shrub of rich red roses beyond the trees, rubbery, arching spears of succulents with serrated edges, and the soft powdery dirt scattered with pinecones at the base of the tall cypress that leaned away from the house. Across the street was a latticework gate in an Oriental style. Now and then, in the sunlight, a young girl in loose blue clothing carrying a tennis racket would enter the gate, greeted by two small dogs. Cars drove by slowly, climbing or descending the hill. People out for a walk appeared suddenly with a soft patter of footsteps on the asphalt or a louder, brittle ring of voices, old women and old couples, nicely dressed, white-haired, walking carefully down to the ocean or down to the main street to shop or to look at the window displays, and back up to their houses. Roaming dogs trotted into view from the edge of the windowframe, sniffing.

I often heard a train going by at some distance, down the hill from me, close to the water. It was easier to hear at night. During the day, many other noises came between me and it: the voices of my pleasant neighbors with time on their hands talking in the street outside my window, the occasional cars winding their way slowly up and down the side of the hill, the constant traffic of cars and trucks two blocks down from me on the coast road, the engines of heavy machinery at construction sites a few blocks away, the sound of hammering and sawing from the same sites, and other noises I couldn’t distinguish creating a general din that seemed benevolent because it went on under the steady, hot sun and in the midst of an orderly profusion of dark green, thick-leaved shrubs and trees and ground cover scattered with dark red and pale blue flowers.

At night, the air, soft and fragrant, was clear of most of these noises, as it was clear of the hot sun and the profuse colors, as the plants, in the dark, were only soft shapes against the walls of buildings or against the curb of the street, and through this emptier air I could hear the wheels of the train clattering along the track and the hoot of its whistle, as pure as its single yellow eye.

During the day I might leave my table to go outside, and if I had been inside for a long time, the warmth of the sun, the sweetness of the breeze, and the colors of the plants beyond the white fence were so intensified by the hours indoors that they seemed an almost unbearable assault. I would drive Madeleine to get clay or to shop for food. Or I would walk down to the main street past the fenced yard of cactuses and bare dirt, past an old man in a straw hat and overalls gardening very slowly with large leather pads strapped to his shins, past the Norwegian church, past the wooden medical offices with their spotless windows, sprinklers coming on and going off everywhere in the beds of sea fig, endless sunshine glinting off the chrome of the cars.

Or I walked on the beach or the hillside, alone or with Madeleine. When she was not busy making something out of clay or papier-mâché, in her room or out on the terrace, when she was not cooking or eating, when she was not meditating or watching television, all of which she did with the same serious, undivided attention, she would walk for hours at a time with a steady, restless energy, her dog by her side, stopping only to talk to someone she knew or to fend off small gangs of boys who teased her and called her by insulting names because she was not like the other people in the town. She walked up and down the main street, she walked beyond the shops to the park, she walked beyond the railroad station to the beach, by the water into the distance and then back to the point she had started from and into the distance again in the other direction.

If I walked with Madeleine, we walked on the beach or along the cliff overlooking the ocean, and if I walked alone, I went up the hill away from the house.

Because the town was built on a steep hill, and because all the towns along the coast were built on hillsides or on top of the cliff above the ocean, I always had the sense of living above something, of living on a small level spot, a ledge or a plateau, with steep slopes above and below. My house and its terrace were one level place. The coast road was another. The park below it was another, and a short drop below that the railroad tracks another, carved into the hillside above the beach. The roads above my house were now steep, now level for a moment, now rising gently, as I walked up past lush gardens hanging off the hillside, yards so thickly planted that it wasn’t always easy to see that a grove of trees was part of a property, a private property, attached to a house that was often concealed. The properties were carefully tended, but on the edge of each there might be a single beer bottle or can, by the road, as though the road itself, running like a river through this place of private properties, carried on its back the life of the outside world, and had thrown up on its banks signs of the outside world that the owners of the properties would carefully remove, walking along the edges of their groves or lawns by day, and that the road with its flotillas of joyriding, fast-moving teenagers, a river rising and then falling again, would leave again by night. And almost every road tended to climb the hillside and descend again, whether it went straight up, steeply, when, as I walked, my back would be to the ocean, or went gently up, running across the hillside almost parallel to the ocean, when I would see the ocean from almost every point on the road, either a bit of blue sheeting behind the branches of a pine or a broad plain of blue, or silver, or black, where I had come out past a house and above any planting, so that if I followed it up far enough it always went down again, as though it could only resist the force of gravity for so long. At a distance ahead of me in the middle of the crossroads I might see a large pinecone, or it might be a mourning dove, dark and cone-shaped. The breath of the eucalyptus would be so heavy on the air it coated my open lips.

Because this landscape and this climate were new to me, I liked to study them, though less often on foot and more often through the windows of my room or my car. The coast road roughly followed the line of the coast, sometimes veering inland on the other side of the hill from the ocean and sometimes staying within sight of it, but high above, on a cliff. When it descended to run right alongside the beach and close to the water, I would look out at the waves, looming over my head, or up at the hang gliders in the air like great birds, or across the sand at the black-suited surfers coming back toward the road with their surfboards under their arms, all these people not only on the sand but also in the water, and in the air. In the air were also kites and once or twice a great, striped, hot-air balloon racing inland.

People on the beach were often in pairs, two divers in suits weighed down with gear occupied with buckling or unbuckling their things, or two hefty bearded men in shorts exercising side by side, or a middle-aged man and wife with straight brown legs and spotless sweatshirts and shorts walking at a brisk pace, or a muscular blond student, glasses pushed back on his head, in a chair reading a heavy leather-bound book while his blond girlfriend lay near him on a towel. If I was not in the car but down on the beach, from a certain spot I could look up and see the little seaside train station, trains coming in with ringing bells, thick crowds edging the platform.

* * *

There is a train near here, too, a freight train that takes so long to go by that I have forgotten all about it by the time it has passed. It, too, is easier to hear late at night, when the road is quiet and the rhythmic click of the wheels bounces off the hillside behind it. Or in wet weather, when the tracks seem so near they might lie just out of sight beyond the trees.

This morning I ache all over because I worked so hard yesterday cleaning the house and preparing a complicated meal for one guest, a lone man who seems all the more lone because he is so tall and thin and has such a simple name, Tom, and who, maybe for the same reason, always gives the impression of being a quiet man though he talks quite readily. The dinner went off fairly well despite the fact that Vincent’s father was such a distraction to us, sitting in an armchair to my right and asking for pieces of my food.

So much time has gone by since I started working on this novel that first I left my city apartment and moved in with Vincent, and then his father moved in with us, causing extra work and bringing a succession of nurses into the house to care for him.

During the same time, a meadow I used to pass on my walks was replaced by a small townhouse development. The meadow had many wildflowers, and at least four different varieties of grasses. It had a small grove of spindly saplings at one end, and at the other a great oak tree set back against the rocky hillside near a trolley shed. Now the oak is gone, and the row of townhouses sits back against the hillside. In front of it, where the meadow lay, is only the fresh black asphalt of a new driveway and a considerable stretch of bare lawn.

On another empty lot outside our village, a car wash has been built. And only a few months ago, a large project of residential housing and offices was approved despite the opposition of almost everyone in the town. It will occupy some wild acres down the road from here where the chicken farmer used to roam around when he was a boy. The chicken farm has also closed down its operation and the farmer makes birdhouses to sell in his roadside store. These are only a few of the changes.

We have a new nurse for Vincent’s father, and she is on duty downstairs now. She seems responsible and a hard worker, and more cheerful than the last, though something of a hypochondriac. She wears a tattoo on her upper arm that I haven’t yet dared to examine. At the moment, the old man is demanding a different lunch from the lunch I wrote down for him. The whole time I am up here I am also listening to them with one ear. The old man accepted her very sweetly this morning, and put his arms around her when she came, though it is only her second day. She whispered to me, “I think he likes my hair.” If she does not keep him distracted, though, he will begin asking for me.

I have had almost constant problems with these nurses. Although they like the old man, they don’t last very long. One came only half the time, came late when she did come, and offered a different excuse each time — illness, car trouble, a heavy menstruation, the change to daylight saving time, etc. Another contracted to work the whole summer and then, after a few weeks, abruptly told me she was going off to the Caribbean Islands to teach cooking. When I protested, she became indignant and disappeared altogether without even coming to say goodbye to Vincent’s father, who continued to be puzzled by this no matter what we told him.

In the living room below me now, the nurse is coughing and picking out a tune on the piano, maybe to let me know it is time for me to stop work and relieve her. One of them used to come up and announce the time if I was five minutes late going down. Another just let the old man begin climbing the stairs, though it was so hard for him.

* * *

He told me, after several days had gone by, that he had left at daybreak after the first night because he did not know if I would want to wake up with him. Later that morning he went to see Ellie in the library. He wanted her advice. He wanted to know if she thought he should wait for me to come out of my class, if he should stand by the path to my classroom building and meet me. Ellie said of course he should. He wanted to know if it would make me uncomfortable. She said of course it would not. So it was with Ellie’s encouragement that he waited for me later, carefully posed, holding or smoking his pipe. Ellie told me all this months after.

The second time he came, he stayed on into the morning and spent the day with me. We went walking on the beach. As he climbed down to the sand over the rocks I could not look at him, though I was not sure why. We walked a long way past the rocks and over the drifts of broken seashells without talking. I was uncomfortable. I thought he was silent out of timidity. I made efforts to talk to him, but it was hard. The silence between us was so thick that words were not so much spoken as forced through it. I stopped trying.

* * *

I did not know what his last name was, and I was not sure of his first name. If it was what I thought it was, it was unusual and I had never known anyone with such a name. I was embarrassed to ask him. I hoped I would see it or hear it somewhere.

I wonder, now, why I did not call someone up and ask. There were at least two people I could have called. But I did not know them very well, as I would later. It is easier for me to see why I did not ask him directly. The moment had passed long before when I could have done that without feeling foolish.

I did not find out what his name was for several days, because during these days I was almost always alone with him. And because I did not have a name for him, he continued to seem like a stranger, even though he was very quickly becoming so close to me. When I did learn his name, I was learning the name of someone like a husband, a brother, or a child to me. But because I learned it only after I knew him so well, his name also seemed strangely arbitrary, as though it did not have to be that one but could have been any other.

* * *

Two days after I met him, I came home late and went to bed and lay there in the dark, nervous, thinking about him, wishing he were with me, then sleeping lightly for only a moment or two before waking again to think about him. Suddenly, after two in the morning, a car roared up the hill past my window, headlights swam over the room, the engine died, and the headlights went off. I looked out the window by my bed and saw the white hood of a car parked beyond the big cedar in front of the house. I heard a voice speaking, and I could distinguish some of what it said: “I want you … I can’t … this carousel … this old carousel … into the city…” I was sure he was the one talking to himself out there, because the car was white, it roared, and it had stopped outside my house. I thought that if he did this, it might mean he was a little crazy. But I did not yet know him very well. I did not know if he was crazy. I only knew he became distracted from time to time, and forgot what he was doing and where he was. At this point, I was willing to accept whatever I might learn next, though it frightened me a little.

I put on some clothes. I walked out by the side of the house and under the cedar tree along the driveway to the edge of the street. But now I saw that the car was smaller than his. It was not his car after all. Now I was frightened for a different reason — this was a stranger out of control, even more unpredictable. I turned back toward the house, the headlights came on again and caught me, and the voice said, “Are you all right?” I stopped walking and asked, “Who are you?” and the voice said something like “I’m just trying to sort myself out.”

I went back in. I went down the hall to the bathroom. I sat down on the toilet and saw that my hands and legs were shaking.

Later that night I dreamed I had found a short piece of his writing on the hall floor. It had a title page and my name on it and my address at the university. Most of it was plainly written, but it contained a passage about Paris in which the writing became suddenly more lyrical, including a phrase about the “shudder of war.” Then the style became plain again. The last sentence was briefer than the rest: “We are always surprising our bookkeepers.” In the dream, I liked the piece and was relieved by that, although I did not like the last sentence. Once I was awake, I liked the last sentence, too, even more than the rest.

I see now that since I hadn’t yet read anything by him at the time of the dream, what I was doing was composing something by him that I would like. And although this was my dream and he did not write what I dreamed he wrote, the words I remember still seem to belong to him, not to me.

* * *

Three days after we met, a friend called him by his first name in my presence and then I knew I had been right. Another two days went by, and I learned his last name when I went into the special section of the library containing little magazines and saw his full name printed with his poems.

I had wondered what I would do if I did not like his poems. But I had not even thought about seeing his last name on the page and was not prepared for the shock I felt. The shock did not come from the name itself, dense with consonants and difficult to pronounce, and one I had never seen before and would never see again, so that it seemed to belong only to him. The shock came from something else I couldn’t at first identify.

Knowing his name, after I had waited so many days to learn it, seemed to increase his reality. It gave him a place in the world that he had not had before, and it allowed him to belong more to the day than he had before. Until then, he had belonged to a time when I was tired and did not think as well as I did in the daytime, and did not see as well, when there was darkness on all sides of whatever light there was, and he came and went through darkness and shadow more than light.

Then, too, as long as he had only a first name, he might belong to a story told me by someone else, or he might be no more than a friend of someone else, he might be a person I did not know very well. In fact, I did not know him very well, at the same time that I had already become so close to him that not an inch separated us.

But even after I knew his name, even when I had known him for weeks, I never quite lost the feeling that he was someone I had never seen in the daylight, who came suddenly into my room with me in the middle of the night and had a name I was not sure of.

I had another shock after I was done reading his poems and went to find Ellie in the back of the Rare Books section, when she told me that his mother was only five years older than I was.

* * *

For a long time, I did not know what to call him in the novel, or what to call myself either. What I really wanted was a one-syllable English name for him, to match his own actual name, but as I searched for an equivalent, I found my mind playing the same trick it played on me when I came up against a difficult problem in translating — the only solution that really seemed to fit was the original word itself. Finally I decided to take the names for the two characters from the names of the man and woman in a story he had written. So at that point I called them Hank and Anna. Then I gave Ellie the beginning of the novel to read. I said there was no hurry, she did not have to read it right away, but I did not expect her to take as long as she did. At first I did not mind that she hadn’t read it, because I did not want to think about it myself. I wanted to rest from the novel. But finally I became impatient to hear what she had to say.

The reason she did not want to read it right away was that the story was too much like an experience she was having at the time. She had become very attached to a man younger than she was. He had not left her, but she was afraid he would. By the time he did leave her, soon after, she had still not read what I had given her, and now it was even harder, though she told me she was trying to prepare herself to do it. She was so angry she wanted to move to a foreign country.

In the meantime, I thought of showing it to someone else, but no one seemed quite right. Several friends had offered to look at it, but some of them, I knew, would not be objective, and others would probably not be helpful for other reasons. I could think of two who would be helpful, but I wanted to wait until I had more to show them.

Vincent asked me why I didn’t show it to him. He seemed eager to read it, maybe in order to find out more about me, and about certain episodes in my life I have been hiding from him, he thinks, such as what he calls my “fling” in Europe. I would not call it a “fling” to be lying in a hotel bed for four nights next to a thin, nervous man, trying not to wake him up, and then, when I couldn’t sleep, sitting on the tiles of the bathroom floor trying to read but too drunk to make sense of what I was looking at. This man had terrible trouble sleeping when he was away from home. He was often away on trips, and when he returned to his wife in the Jura Mountains he slept for several weeks. This was what he told me. His face white and tense with fatigue, he would creep through the darkened hotel room saying he had to sleep. He would crawl under the covers, curl up at my back, start talking into my neck, and continue for an hour or more. Then he would doze off. If I couldn’t sleep, I would go into the bathroom, turn on the light, and sit on the floor, or I would leave the hotel.

The first night, I got out of the hotel all right and back into my own hotel. The second time I tried to leave, it was dawn and the front door was locked. I didn’t want to wake the tired man, since he was sleeping at last, so I rang for the night clerk, who came out in his bathrobe, his face very cross, and unlocked the door only after a lot of arguing. I went out through the steamy entryway past a tiled basin of goldfish and into a street where a group of workmen in the early morning sun were repainting a yellow line on the road and looked up at me curiously, since I was still dressed in my black evening clothes. The front door of my own hotel was locked, too, so I walked around the village for a while, watching as people set up stalls in the marketplace.

Later that day, when I went to the beach to swim, I did not feel very well. All I could do was stand waist-deep in the water for a long time looking out at the horizon and then back at the other bathers, who lay flat on their straw mats or sat in the strong wind shading their eyes from the stinging sand. I soon began to feel faint from the heat and the glare, made my way out of the water and up the sand toward the beach café, and spent the rest of the afternoon sitting there in my robe under the concerned gaze of the owner and the waitress, holding ice against my forehead and eating a little salt off my fingertip. When the sun was low in the sky, a tall Englishwoman helped me across the sand to a taxi and then settled me in my hotel room with some aspirin and a glass of water.

I don’t want to show this to Vincent just yet, because he seems so skeptical already. He knows more or less what the book is about, though I haven’t told him directly, and he tends to regard all the love affairs in my life as having been sordid. I admit there were other men before him. There was a painter who lived alone in an old boat shop, and an anthropologist who used to take me to the opera with his mother. There was another directly after that one, who smiled a great deal, and another directly before him, who drank a great deal, and the one who took me into the desert, and another before that, who became very jealous over things he only imagined. But none of these affairs lasted very long, a few were not even consummated, and all were with entirely respectable sorts of men, most of them college professors.

Ellie finally read the pages I had sent her. By then she was about to move to a foreign country after all, though only for one year and not because of her young lover, and my manuscript was part of the business she had to take care of before she left. She seemed to like it, but she said the names were wrong. She did not want the hero to be named Hank. She thought no one could fall in love with someone named Hank. She said it made her think of “handkerchief.” Of course it isn’t true that no one can fall in love with someone named Hank. But she meant I could choose any name I liked for my hero, while men named Hank, and the men and women who fall in love with them, are not free to choose.

After Ellie objected so much to Hank, I called the woman Laura and the man Garet for a while. But I did not really like the name Laura for this woman, since a woman named Laura feels to me like a peaceful woman, or at least a graceful one. Susan might have been better, but a woman named Susan would be too sensible to walk from one end of a town to the other and back again for an hour at a time, at night, looking for a man and his old white car even if he is with another woman, just because she is determined to have at least a glimpse of him. She would not drive to his house in the rain and walk up onto a balcony and look in the window of his apartment.

So then I called her Hannah, and then Mag, and then Anna again. I described my room, and how this woman, Anna, sat at the card table trying to work despite everything. In other versions it was Laura at my card table, or Hannah playing the piano, or Ann in my bed. For a long time I called him Stefan. I was even calling the novel Stefan at that point. Then Vincent said he did not like the name because it was too European. I agreed that it was European, though I thought it suited him. But I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it anyway, so I tried to think of another name.

A friend of mine who has written several novels told me a few months ago that in one novel she went ahead so fast, looking back only a page or two each day, that she later discovered, when she reread the novel, that the name of one character changed twelve times in the course of the book.

* * *

What I saw, when I saw him standing by the path waiting for me, was not only his face, not only his hands, and not only the position of his body, but also his red plaid flannel shirt, frayed at the collar, his thready white sweatshirt, his khaki army pants, and his hiking boots. He had a pipe in his hand and a bag over his arm.

Each time I met him, in the beginning, I paid such close attention to what I saw when he appeared, and what was different about him from what I had last seen, that I remember his clothes with surprising clarity.

If I put my arms around him, what I felt under my fingers, against my skin, was the material of his clothes, and only when I pressed harder did I feel the muscles and bones of his body. If I touched him on the arm I was actually touching the cotton sleeve of his shirt, and if I touched him on the leg, I was touching the worn denim of his pants, and if I put my hand on his lower back, I felt not only the two ridges of muscle, hard as bone, but also the soft wool of his sweater warming to the warmth of my hand, and if he was hugging me against his chest, what I would see, within an inch of my eye, was the weave of cotton threads of his shirt or woolen threads of his sweater or the fuzzy nap of his lumber jacket.

Just as he looked a little different to me each time I saw him, I also learned new things about him each time. Each thing I learned about him came as a small shock, and either pleased me or disturbed me, and disturbed me either a little or a good deal. When we sat in the bar later that day, the first day, he surprised me by saying angry things about some of my students and then about Mitchell. His tone was a tone of jealousy, though he had no reason to be jealous. And when he said these angry things, he abruptly seemed a stranger to me again, one I didn’t like. Only when I knew him better did I understand that the anger I heard came from his disappointment, and he was often disappointed. Nearly everyone disappointed him and therefore angered him — nearly every man, anyway: he expected a great deal from men, and he wanted to admire them.

He was angry with certain men and he was indignant at certain great writers, and the two feelings came from the same sort of disappointment, I thought. He was always reading the great writers, as though determined to know all the best that had ever been written. He would read most of what one great writer had written, then he would become indignant. There was something wrong there, he would say. He respected the writer, but there was something wrong. He would read most of what another had written and again become indignant. There was something wrong there, too. It was as though these writers had failed him. To be great might mean to be perfect, in his eyes. When he pointed out how they failed, I couldn’t disagree — his reasons were not bad. But in his determined reading he left behind one failed writer after another. Maybe he had to see how they failed if he was to find a place in that world for himself.

One of the things I learned, because I asked him directly, was that there had been not just a few but many women before me, and that I was not even the oldest. At the time, this startled me and seemed to diminish what there was between us. Then, as time passed, I became used to the idea and accepted it.

Later I could say to myself that at least I was the last woman, since he married after he left me. But maybe he hadn’t even been telling me the whole truth. It was the slight pause before he answered me, and his look of embarrassment, that made me believe him. Maybe he was embarrassed by the crudeness of my question, and a false answer was the only answer to such a question.

* * *

The first time I told him I loved him he only looked at me thoughtfully without answering, as though considering what I had said. At the time, I did not understand his hesitation. The words were drawn out of me, almost despite me, and he did not answer. Now I think that if he could be so careful about saying the same thing to me, he probably loved me more deeply than I loved him. I had probably said what I said much too soon to mean it, and he knew that, though he couldn’t help saying the same to me a few days later, since he probably really did love me, or thought he did.

I say at one point that I fell in love with him quite suddenly, and that it happened when we were staring at each other by candlelight. But this seems too easy, and I also can’t remember just what candlelight I was talking about. There was no candlelight in the café the first evening, and there was no candlelight in my house later that night either, so I evidently don’t mean that I fell in love with him the first night. And yet I do remember that even as soon as the next morning, when I saw him again, I felt a sudden, strong emotion. If I wasn’t in love with him, I don’t know what I was feeling. If I had already fallen in love with him by then, it must have happened sometime between the moment he left me in the early morning and the moment I saw him again, unless it happened the very instant I saw him again.

Did it have to happen when he wasn’t present and when I wasn’t aware of it? Maybe it didn’t happen suddenly, after all, but gradually, so that what I felt when I saw him again was only a first degree of it, and there were further degrees — later that day, the next day, the next, and then two days after that, until it reached an extreme of intensity, not destined to go any further, and then wavered and fluctuated before declining gradually, so that the thing was always in motion? A candle may in fact have been burning in the room the first time I said I loved him, but that wasn’t the moment I fell in love with him, I know, so I’m still not sure what candlelight I meant.

If the light was on, I saw every detail of him down to the grain of his skin, and if the room was dark, I saw the outline of him against the dim sky outside, but at the same time knew his face so well that I could see that, too, and even what his expression was, though without the light not all the detail of him was there.

I thought that in certain cases a person fell in love slowly and gradually, and in others very suddenly, but my experience was so limited I couldn’t be sure. It seemed to me I had fallen in love only once before.

There were times when I felt I loved him, but other times when I did not, and because he was wary and intelligent he must have noticed exactly when I seemed to love him and when I did not, and maybe he did not quite believe me because of that. Maybe that was why he hesitated and let so many days go by, after I said I loved him, before he answered me.

I think that a certain hunger for him came first and was followed by a feeling of tenderness, gradually increasing, for a person who aroused such hunger and then satisfied it. Maybe that was what I felt for him that I thought was love.

The first feeling I had for him, though, even before that, was no more than a calm appreciation of him as I first saw him — an agreeable, intelligent, robust sort of person who found me attractive, too, so that in a simple way, that same night, like two hungry and thirsty people, we could decide we wanted to find a place to be alone together and remain together long enough to satisfy our appetite.

This appreciation, and this mild hunger that was not for him in particular but for any man who had some of the qualities I liked in him, did not grow stronger right away, and did not immediately become a particular hunger, a hunger that could be satisfied only by him. Another feeling came before, almost right away, within hours, certainly by the next day, the next time I saw him, and that was a kind of fascination, or a kind of distraction. He entered my mind as a distraction from what had been in my mind before. He took over a large part of my mind so that he was an obstruction to me: I had to think around him to think of anything else, and if I succeeded in thinking of something else, it was not long before the thought of him would push aside the other thought again, as though it had gained strength from being ignored a short time.

He was a distraction to me when I was not with him, and when I was with him, I was fascinated to look at him and listen to him. The sight of him, and the sound of him speaking, kept me still, or kept me near him. It was enough to be near him and watch and listen to him, half paralyzed, whereas just a day or two before I had not even known him.

It was the distraction that seemed to demand that I stop whatever I was doing and return to him, where I could see him, and then it was the fascination that made me need to be close to him, and then it was this need to be close to him that turned into a hunger that grew stronger and stronger in me and in him, too.

* * *

His room was in a town about a mile away from mine, past the racecourse and the fairgrounds and a long stretch of dirt used for parking during the races and fairs. When I drove there I followed a road that curved around the racetrack parking lot, and on one side there was the dark expanse, at night, of that empty lot and on the other another empty stretch, of rutted dirt, going back to a channel of water and farther back to the hills that had no houses on the side overlooking the racetrack but were thick with houses, including mine, on the other, the side above the ocean. I then crossed a narrow bridge over the channel of water that flowed out of the hills, where it was a rocky stream surrounded by scrubby, weedy trees and filled in late May with soft-shelled crawdads, its muddy banks littered with watermelon rinds and beer bottles, down to the ocean, where it was wide and shallow and at ebb tide drawn out by strong currents, its banks of sand eaten away and falling piece by piece into the moving water. I then climbed the inland side of another hill.

The first time I went there, I found my own way, following his directions. Behind a row of garages he had a single, narrow room with no bed, not even a mattress on the floor, only a sleeping bag on the carpet, and no other furniture, only books and clothes standing or falling in piles along the walls, a typewriter, too, unless he kept the typewriter in his garage, and a set of Indian drums. There was a small kitchen adjoining the room, and in the kitchen there was only a hotplate on a table, next to a small refrigerator. The bathroom was off the kitchen. I stayed for a little while, drinking a cup of tea with him or a glass of water, sitting on the carpet. He apologized for the size of the room, probably because I looked so uncomfortable.

After we drank our tea or water, he showed me his garage. He was proud of it. The concrete room was filled with freestanding bookcases containing a large number of books. I was impressed by the number of books he owned. He did not tell me that most of them belonged to a friend. The friend became very angry at him later about something to do with the books, maybe that the books were confiscated by the landlord when he was forced out. There was a desk facing the garage door, with a lamp and a typewriter on it, and he worked here. He often worked for long hours alone at his writing, though it was hard for me to find out from him what he was writing. Either he wouldn’t tell me when I asked or I didn’t want to ask.

I said to myself that the reason I did not often go to his room was that it was so small and dark, but after he moved up the coast one or two towns to a light, airy apartment overlooking a cactus nursery, I did not want to go there either, very often, once, that I remember, when I helped him arrange books in a low bookcase, and another time when he made a very large pot of rather thin cabbage soup for us to eat for supper, but only a few times after that, so I had to admit that I simply preferred to see him in my own house. When he left the apartment overlooking the cactus nursery, I was no longer talking to him very much or very openly, and I knew he had moved but did not know where he had gone. After that, I moved, and I don’t think he knew where I was living either.

* * *

He played the Indian drums, or at least he told me he did and I believed him. He told me he had lived in India when he was a child. He had returned to America on a boat with his mother and sister. He offered to play for me, but a long time went by before I would let him. At the thought of listening to him play this instrument, so strange to me, I felt the same embarrassment I felt some time later when another friend played his guitar and sang freedom songs. I asked him once to drum on my back, and he did, thumping me with his fingers and the heels of his palms. When at last he did play the drums for me, it was toward the end, when I was uncomfortable with him and felt very little for him, and he was hurt by me, and we were doing things that we had not done before, as though to see if we would feel anything more for each other, but I felt only the same embarrassment I had expected to feel.

* * *

When I first started working on the novel, I thought I had to keep very close to the facts about certain things, including his life, as though the point of writing the book would be lost if something like the Indian drums were changed and he were to play another instrument instead. Because I had wanted to write these things for so long, I thought I had to tell the truth about them. But the surprising thing was that after I had written them the way they were, I found I could change them or take them out, as though by writing them once I had satisfied whatever it was I had to satisfy.

At times the truth seems to be enough, as long as I compress it and rearrange it a little. At other times it does not seem to be enough, but I’m not willing to invent very much. Most things are kept as they were. Maybe I can’t think what to put in place of the truth. Maybe I just have a poor imagination.

One reason I kept going back to work on the novel was that I thought I would be able to write it almost without thinking about it, since I knew the story already. But the longer I tried to write it, the less I understood how to work on it. I could not decide which parts were important. I knew which ones interested me, but I thought I had to include everything, even the dull parts. So I tried to write my way through the dull parts and then enjoy the interesting parts when I came to them. But in each case I passed the interesting parts without noticing, so I had to think maybe they were not so interesting after all. I became discouraged.

Several times I was tempted to give up on it. There were other things I wanted to do instead, another novel I wanted to write and a few stories I wanted to finish. I would have been glad to let someone else write this one for me if I could have — as long as it was written, I thought I did not care who wrote it. A friend of mine said that if I didn’t manage to write the novel I could at least save parts of it and make stories out of them, but I did not want to do that. In fact, I did not want to give it up, because I had spent so much time on it already by then. I’m not sure that is a good reason to go on with something, though in certain cases it must be. I once stayed with a man too long for the same reason, that there had already been so much between us. But maybe I had other, better reasons to keep on with this, even if I’m not sure what they were.

So I haven’t been able to write it almost without thinking about it, after all. I tried chronological order and that didn’t work, so I tried a random order. Then the problem was how to arrange a random order so that it made sense. I thought I could have one thing lead to another thing, each part grow out of the part that came before, and also include some relief from that. I tried the past tense, and then I put it in the present tense, even though I was tired of the present tense by then. After that, I left parts of it in the present tense and put the rest back in the past tense.

I kept stopping to translate. I told Vincent I was writing less than a page a week, and he laughed because he thought I was joking. But although it took me so long to write a page, I kept thinking the work would go more quickly. I always had a different reason for thinking it would go more quickly.

At times the novel seems to be a test of myself, both as I was then and as I am now. In the beginning, the woman was not like me, because if she had been, I could not have seen the story clearly. After a while, when I was more used to telling the story, I was able to make the woman more like me. I sometimes think that if there was enough goodness in me then, or enough depth or complexity, this will work, if I can make it work. But if I was simply too shallow or mean-spirited, it will not work, no matter what I do.

* * *

I was not the same with him as I was with other people. I tried not to be as determined, as busy, as hasty, as I was alone and with friends. I tried to be gentle and quiet, but it was hard, and it confused me. It also exhausted me. I had to leave him just to rest from it.

I had to leave him anyway, to work. I gave my students a great deal of work and that meant I had a great deal of work to do myself, reading their papers. I worked in my office and at home in the evenings, too.

My office, between two classics professors on the seventh floor of a new building, was roomy and full of bare shelves, with a row of tall, narrow windows looking out over tennis courts, groves of eucalyptus trees, and the ocean in the distance. The windows were sealed shut and soundproof. But through the walls, whenever I stopped work to listen, I would hear voices: the laughter of a student and teacher together, then the rhythmic chant of the teacher explaining, and then the drone of Latin conjugations — always, it seemed, the verb laudare, “to praise.”

I would stop working, look out the window, and put my hands and then my arms up to my nose and smell my skin. My own smell, of perfume and sweat, reminded me of him.

Another smell that made me think of him was the raw wool of the Mexican blanket on my bed. He would often leave early to let me sleep, but I would not be able to sleep. A few hours later he would come and find me in my office. When I was the first one up, and he got out of bed after I did, he would make the bed carefully and neatly. The first time he did this was the first morning he woke up there. Every time he did it, it seemed to me an act of tenderness, because he was arranging something of mine with such care, and taking part in the arrangements of my house.

* * *

I was waiting for him in a crowded room. He had not come to meet me and I decided he was not going to come. I thought he had left me already, before we had been together even a week. My disappointment was so acute that the room seemed to empty of whatever life it had had, and the air became thin. The people, chairs, sofas, windows, curtains, lectern, microphone, table, tape recorder, and sunlight were empty shells of what they had been before.

When he actually left me, months after that, the world was not empty but worse than empty, as though the quality of emptiness had become so concentrated it turned into a kind of poison, as though each thing appeared alive and healthy but had been injected with a poisonous preserving agent.

This time he had not left me, he had only come late. He was there in the crowd by the door when I stood up to go. The life came back into everything in the room. He explained to me that he had lost track of the time. He occasionally lost track of the time and what he was doing, he did not always know what he was doing or how to plan what he had to do, and it was hard for him, at times, to do what he had to do.

We left the place together to go to a friend’s house and we quarreled on the way.

* * *

There must have been at least seven readings that I went to while I knew him, or even more. It is hard to describe a reading in a way that is exciting, and it would be harder still to describe more than one in the same novel, even if some of the poetry I heard made me angry, which it did. I could change them to something else, like lectures, or dances, but I don’t think I would have gone to more than one dance. The last reading was a reading of sound poetry, the most difficult one for me. Because I was forced to sit still while my mind had nothing much to hold on to, it wandered away from me and went through the plate-glass window searching yet again for him.

* * *

We were quarreling over his friend Kitty. We were sitting together in his car in a narrow, sunlit street. On either side of us were small patches of clipped green lawn that came right down to the white sidewalks. The houses set in these patches of lawn were small and white, of one story, with red-tiled roofs. A short palm tree grew beside one house, a shrub with rubbery leaves by another, a red-flowered vine by a third. Each house on this street seemed to have a lawn and just one other thing growing on the lawn, as if that were a rule. The sun shone down at an angle and reflected off the white sidewalk and the white walls of the houses, and because the houses were so low and small, with so few trees about, a great expanse of blue sky was visible. We were waiting to get out of the car and go into a friend’s house. Either we were the first to arrive or we were simply trying to finish our quarrel.

He was going to give a reading himself in a few days. He was going to read a few of his poems and also a story. He told me he wanted to invite this woman Kitty to his reading because she had helped him to plan it.

The last time he had talked about her had been in my office. He had come up behind me in the hallway outside my office, and put his arms around me and kissed me there, publicly, which had made me nervous. Though the hallway ahead of me seemed to be empty, I thought someone appeared suddenly behind me and vanished again.

Sitting inside my office, first he complained about her, then he worried about her. I did not like hearing even this woman’s name, because as soon as he mentioned it he seemed to move away from me, to go out of the room and leave me sitting there opposite his face, which was abstracted and preoccupied, with a slight frown of annoyance on it, and opposite his body, which had become very still. I felt I had been forgotten, or at least what I was to him now had been forgotten, as though he had suddenly mistaken me for an old friend to whom he could confide his worries or complaints about Kitty.

Kitty appeared in his room a few weeks later, and the reason he gave me for her visit did not make sense to me when I tried to understand it.

* * *

His reading was on a Sunday afternoon, in an elegant old house on a hill in a run-down part of the city. The house had heavy banisters and stained-glass windows in the stairwells, thick curtains drawn back from the doorways with velvet cords, alcoves and bay windows, high ceilings and chandeliers. He read with another poet, a man my age, but I can’t remember who it was, and I also confuse this reading with another one in the same house months later, after he had left me, in which a woman read a story about Robinson Crusoe. I stood at the back of the room, where I could look away from the rows of people through an arched doorway into the next room, which was empty. I watched what I could see of him where he stood, the length of the room away from me, at a lectern. I could see only his head and shoulders above the heads of the audience. I was prepared to be embarrassed, for his sake, if he did not read well or if he read something that was not very good. But he read clearly and confidently, and nothing he read sounded bad, though I did not particularly like the story he read. Kitty did not come.

* * *

I could say more about the house where he read, but I’m not sure how much description to have in the novel. Another thing I could describe would be the landscape, the reddish, sandy earth spilling onto the edges of the sidewalks everywhere, the lines of cliffs above the ocean and the eroded sandy ravines descending to the water, the ocean so close I could hear the waves late at night, like a curtain coming down again and again, if the tide was high. It was not a lush landscape, because the climate was so dry. Part of each year, the hills were brown, and the only thick green vegetation grew up in the clefts of the hills where the dampness would gather, or in the towns where plants were watered and the succulent ground cover thrived and fat shrubs with glistening leaves hugged the shops. Because I had not known the landscape before, it interested me. It was so difficult, with broad highways cutting through everything and always some new construction rising abruptly off a brown hill, houses stacked or piled on top of each other in the wide-open spaces as though anticipating future congestion, or in a small canyon a line of new houses along a new road, and at the end of the line the latest house under construction, a framework of raw wood, while the first houses were already occupied, with cars in the driveways. Only rarely did a vestige of something older remain like a vision, an old ranch house at a distance from the road, a weedy, dusty track leading to it and a grove of gnarled live-oak trees and eucalyptus around it.

Eucalyptus trees with their smoky, oily smell grew everywhere, very tall, the boles going far up before sending out a branch. They were untidy trees, with wood soft and weak. They kept losing branches, so that there were great gaps along the trunks. They kept dropping their narrow, tan, spear-shaped leaves, which littered the ground under them, and layers of bark fell from them in long strips, along with little wooden buttons, brown with crosses carved out of them on one side, powdery blue on the other. An old professor at the university often complained that as he lay in bed at night he was kept awake by the hooting of a nearby owl and by those wooden buttons which dropped onto the roof over his head and rolled down to the eave, one by one, dropping and rolling, dropping and rolling all night long.

* * *

After his reading, in the late afternoon, he and I went with a group of others to a friend’s house on another hill nearby, directly under a flight path to the airport out in the bay. We spent most of the time in the back yard, and enormous airplanes flew low overhead frequently. Each time, we would stop talking and wait until they passed. The yard was weedy and a pretty lime tree grew near the house. Two little boys threw balls into the air over and over again, and the balls kept getting caught in the tree or landing on the roof of a shed at the back of the yard.

He had not read the story I knew already, the one he had described to me as a novel the first evening we met, a very clear, precise, and confident story about a man and a woman in their middle age who meet at the seaside where the woman is on vacation and the man works for a hotel, the setting vaguely European. It contained quiet, well-turned descriptions, including one about the effect of the sun on the woman’s pale legs, that I liked each time I read them. I liked so many parts of the story that the rest of it also seemed good. Now I wonder if I was drawn to him because he had the sort of mind that would want to write that sort of story, the sort that I liked already, or if he was drawn to me because I had the sort of mind that would like the sort of story he liked to write. A friend of mine, after reading the story, said he did not like it, because the characters, so very silent and distant with each other, yet so firmly tied by their wordless understanding, were not people he would want to know. I did not think about that, but only about how the story was written.

Later he read me seven short poems that he had written for me. He told me he had made a rule for himself that each one had to contain a reference to a flower. He would not let me keep them because they were not finished. In the end, he never gave me a copy of the poems. Maybe he never finished them. So I don’t have them here, where I could reread them and see what I think of them now, as I have the story. It is here in my room, in a folder by itself, though I have not looked at it often, in all these years, for fear of knowing it so well that I can’t see it anymore for what it is. But every time I have read it, the phrases ring peacefully in my ears, the order and clarity still please me.

I remember a few lines from his poems, including one in which he said the coast had a mile in it. That was the mile between my house and his. I liked the poems, though they were more careful than the story, or rather the care he put into them was so evident they seemed cautious, whereas the care in the story seemed just right. I had heard those poems, and I heard others at his reading, and I had read still others in the library, or maybe the same ones he had read, and I knew one story well, and heard another at his reading, and later he would read to me from his notebook, and this was all I knew of his writing. He was always writing, and he told me from time to time that he was working on a story, or a play, or another play, and later a novel, but I never saw any of them because he never seemed to finish one thing before abandoning it or putting it aside temporarily, as he said, and starting another, and he wouldn’t show me any work unless it was almost finished.

He wrote things in a notebook, and I wrote things in a notebook. Some of what we wrote was about each other, of course, and now and then we read aloud from our notebooks. The things we had written were often things we would not say to each other, though we would read them aloud. But we were not willing to say anything about them after we had read them either.

So that behind my silence, and behind his silence, there was a good deal of talk, but that talk was in the pages of our notebooks, and was therefore silent, unless we chose to open the notebooks and read from them.

* * *

If he had been a bad writer, I think I could not have gone on with him. Or my lack of respect for the thing he did that was most important to him would have destroyed us before very long. But the fact that he wrote well did not help me to love him more deeply than I did. If I loved him at all, that had nothing to do with his writing, and when I talked to him about writing I felt I was not his lover and we were as distant as two people who did not know each other very well but respected and liked each other.

The distance between us at these times was not unlike the distance between us when we were with friends. We never gave any sign, in front of other people, of what was between us. It was evident to someone else only when we arrived together or left together, two moments I always savored, partly because they were in such contrast to all the other moments, when our closeness was unacknowledged. I wasn’t ashamed of him, or embarrassed, but I often wanted to move away from him, so that although I knew he was near me, I did not touch him. In fact, I wanted to have him near me and at the same time move away from him.

Maybe we never stopped being conscious of our oddness, that some people might disapprove of us because he was so much younger, or because I was a teacher and he was a student, though he was not my student and many other teachers were his friends, and though he was older than most of the other students. But maybe we also sensed that if we had even simply held hands in front of our friends, they would have paid close attention to this, and it would have satisfied their lively curiosity about just how we behaved together, just what our relationship was — did I act as a mother toward him? Was he protective of me, like a son or a father? Or were we the same age in our behavior? Were we tense or relaxed? Were we violent together or gentle? Were we mean or kind?

I knew their curiosity was lively because in that place, as long as I lived there, and even after I left, all of us had a great deal of interest in the lives of our friends and our acquaintances and even people we had never met. There was a great hunger for stories, especially stories involving emotion and drama, especially love and betrayal, though this curiosity and interest was not unkind, usually.

* * *

Another reading was given by someone I identified in my notebook as “S.B.” After that reading, where he sat behind me, we went out with a group of people to a Mexican restaurant. There were many meals in restaurants at that time, especially in Mexican restaurants, because groups of friends and groups hosting visitors to the university often went out to eat together. Later in the novel I mention a dinner in a Japanese restaurant during which I left the table and tried to call him from a phone booth by the restrooms. But I do not describe the meal or the friends, even though there were some interesting people present. In fact, throughout these months I was also seeing and meeting interesting people, so that everything surrounding the story, everything I am leaving out of it, would make another story, or even several others, quite different in character from this one.

Later, we stood alone in a friend’s living room and he was offended because I would not kiss him. He may have thought I was ashamed of him, but I simply did not want him to kiss me just then.

I can’t remember who “S.B.” is or what sort of reading it was. I also can’t remember, though I try over and over again, what happened in the week before it, when he and I were just getting to know each other. There are only two entries in my notebook for that week, and only one has anything to do with him. In that entry I describe what seems to me an incident without any importance at all: I was having lunch at a café on campus with a person I identify as “L.H.” We were sitting outdoors on the terrace. A skunk appeared in the concrete planter of a tree near us and caused some excitement among the students and faculty eating lunch. I happened to glance over at the doorway that led into the café, and I saw him standing there with a tray in his hands, looking displeased. I thought he was disappointed that so many people were sitting there in the sun, and all the seats were taken, but he could have been frowning because his eyes were not good, or because the sunlight was so bright, since he frowned often, especially in the sunlight. I don’t know if he saw us and came over, if he sat with us, or if he simply turned around and left. If I hadn’t written anything in my notebook about that week, and if I hadn’t remembered the reading, I don’t think I would be so acutely aware of those days about which I can’t remember anything.

I am working from my memories and my notebook. There is a great deal I would have forgotten if I had not written it in my notebook, but my notebook also leaves out a great deal, only some of which I remember. There are also memories that have nothing to do with this story, and there are good friends who do not appear in it, or appear only indistinctly, because at the time they had nothing or little to do with him.

* * *

When I think of him frowning in the sunlight as he looked out at the café terrace, I wonder if I have been wrong, all this time, about another occasion on which he was frowning. The only photograph I have of him shows him frowning at me from a distance of about fifteen feet. He is on a sailboat belonging to a cousin of mine, he is bending over, his hands are busy, perhaps fastening a rope, and he is looking up sideways at me, frowning. The picture is not very sharp, probably taken with a poor camera. I have assumed all this time that he was frowning in annoyance at me for taking his picture at such a time, when he was trying to do something difficult on the boat of a man who made him uncomfortable because he barked orders at him to do things like fasten certain ropes and also because he clearly did not approve of this relationship. But now I realize he might have been frowning merely because he was looking up suddenly into the bright sunlight.

A year after this picture was taken I went sailing with the same cousin, on the same boat. Back home, I happened to take the picture out and look at it again. This time I had trouble reconciling what I saw with what I knew. He was there on the boat, in the picture, and I was looking at him, but he was not on that boat any longer: I had just been there the day before, and I knew he was not there. Within an hour after the picture was taken, in fact, he was no longer on the boat, because we were at the dock when I took it, preparing to go ashore. But as long as he and I were still together he was somehow still on the boat, he was not distinctly absent from it, as he was a year later.

* * *

I have been thinking about that photograph, because I mentioned it to Ellie recently on the phone. Except for her one year in England, Ellie has lived near me for a long time. But now she is about to move again, this time to the Southwest. She told me she had gone down to the basement of her apartment building the day before to look through her things. First she discovered that she couldn’t open the padlock on her storage bin. Another tenant, believing the storage bin was his, had instructed his secretary to break off the lock Ellie had put on it many years before and replace it with a new one. The lock had belonged to Ellie’s father. It had been the only thing of his she had left. Everything to do with this move was disturbing to her anyway. Now she was further disturbed because her father’s lock had been destroyed and removed by a stranger, and she was shut out of her bin. Then, when she was able to get into it, she found that a flood had ruined some of her books and papers.

But she was calling to tell me she had discovered several photographs of him in one of her boxes, and she thought I might like to have them. She said there were two, but then, as she went on talking to me and at the same time looked through the pile of pictures in her hand, pictures of a party she couldn’t remember, and more of people we both knew and people only she knew, she discovered another of him, although in this picture he was partly obscured by a cluster of people. She asked me if I wanted copies of them. I told her I did, though I also said that when the envelope arrived I might not open it right away.

By now I am used to the version of his face that I have created from my own memory and the one snapshot I have. If I saw a clear picture of him or, even worse, several pictures from different angles and in different lights, I would have to get used to a new face. I don’t want to be unsettled just now, and I know I will be tempted not to open the envelope at all. But I will also be curious.

* * *

The nurse, downstairs, is playing the piano to entertain Vincent’s father. She is making mistakes just where I know she will. I listen for the mistakes and can’t hear the words I am trying to write. The old man loves it when she plays, though.

These days, in the warm weather, spiders spin webs between the bottoms of the lampshades and the sides of the lamps. Many strange small black insects fly constantly about the lamp. We have screens on all the windows and doors, but the cat has torn holes in the bottom corners of some. Spiders also spin single strands of web across the paths in the yard at night, even in the time it takes me to walk out to the corner grocery store and back, so that when I come in from the street the soft threads collect on my bare legs.

Before the meadow was plowed over in preparation for building the townhouses, I began learning to identify the wildflowers that grew there, then the wild grasses. I had never thought of identifying kinds of grass before. Now I realize that I should be able to identify spiders, too, by their appearance, the forms of their webs, their habits, and where they choose to live, so that I can name them instead of calling them “big spider,” “little spider,” “little tan spider,” etc.

At times I have the feeling someone else is working on this with me. I read a passage I haven’t looked at in weeks and I don’t recognize much of it, or only dimly, and I say to myself, Well, that’s not bad, it’s a reasonable solution to that problem. But I can’t quite believe I was the one who found the solution. I don’t remember finding it, and I am relieved, as though I expected the problem still to be there.

In the same way, I will decide to include a certain thought in a certain place in the novel and then discover that several months before, I made a note to include the same thought in the same place and then did not do it. I have the curious feeling that my decision of several months ago was made by someone else. Now there has been a consensus and I am suddenly more confident: if she had the same plan, it must be a good one.

But at other times I discover that this person working with me has been hasty or careless, and now my work is even more difficult, because I have to try to forget what she wrote. Not only do I have to erase it or cross it out but also forget the sound of it or I will write it again, as though from dictation. I should know better, because when I translate, I have to make the English as good as I can when I first write it down or the bad sound of a bad version will stay with me and make it harder for me to write a good version.

Another problem, on some pages, is that I keep putting a sentence in because it seems to belong there, and then I keep taking it out again. I have just figured out why this happens: I put the sentence in because it is interesting, believable, and clearly expressed. I take it out again because something about it is wrong. I put it in again because the sentence is good in itself and could be true. I take it out again because I have at last examined it closely enough to see that for this situation it is simply not true.

There is another reason why I will write a sentence and then immediately take it out: in certain cases I have to write a sentence on the page before I know it won’t work in the novel, because it may be interesting when I say it to myself but no longer interesting when I write it down.

* * *

For a long time, there was the same pattern to our days and nights. I would work all day and sometimes into the evening, or spend the evening with other friends of mine, and he would go to his classes and study and write and see his friends, and then fairly late in the evening he would come by and we would have a beer together and talk and go to bed and get up in the morning and separate for the day. We rarely slept apart from each other, because I had such trouble sleeping if I was by myself and because during the first months, anyway, he had no bed in his room, only his sleeping bag on the floor. He told me he would not buy a bed as long as he could sleep in mine.

He had almost no money. He had no extra money for such a thing as a bed. He had less and less money the longer I knew him. He was waiting for a student loan that was put off from week to week. I had so much money, just then, and was so unused to having money, that I spent it without thinking, and twice I lent him a particular sum of money that he needed. Both times he was reluctant to take it, though the first time more reluctant than the second. The first time, I lent him a hundred dollars, though he was already a little uncomfortable about being twelve years younger and a student, without taking my money, too. He paid it back quickly, but the second sum, $300, which I lent him before I went East for the second time, he never paid back.

He also had great difficulty getting a job. It seems to me he worked in the university library for a while. At the time he left me he was working at a gas station.

Sometimes I played the piano for him. He liked me to play for him. He would sit very still, on the edge of the bed or on a hard chair on the bare floor, and watch me and listen. His face, as usual, gave me no hint of what he might be thinking. We played tennis together, until I did not seem to be able to improve any further and became discouraged. We saw friends together, but these were almost always friends of mine. Though they had known him longer, they were not close friends of his, either because he was so much younger or for some other reason, but they soon became close friends of mine. Once we had a drink with Ellie in a grand old bayside hotel. Ellie later told me she thought I had been rather unkind to him as the three of us sat there talking, side by side on a sofa, watching the guests of the hotel walk by and pause over an antique jigsaw puzzle laid out on a nearby table.

Not long after we met, we went together to visit Evelyn, a friend of Ellie’s and mine who lived with her two young children in three rooms in the back half of a small house. The children were frantic the day we visited, they almost never stopped moving at high speed, laughing or bursting into tears or flailing each other or their mother with their fists. While we talked to Evelyn in the larger room, where she prepared meals, ate, slept, worked, and read books from the library, the children played wildly together, sometimes out in the grove of bamboo trees and around the trash cans in the alley behind the house, and sometimes in their bedroom, where they jumped off the windowsill onto the bed over and over again, or hid from their mother and called out to her, or took off their clothes and sat in large straw baskets. Evelyn kept getting up to scold the children in her gentle, ineffectual way, or to take a lightbulb from the bathroom, or a handful of toilet paper, because she never bought enough of any supply to have extra and was always borrowing something from one room to use in another. Each time Evelyn left the room, I would look over at him where he sat with me at the large, round dining table and feel how content I was with him, how content we were simply to sit there and look at each other, and it seemed to me easier and simpler to love him there than in any other place.

I think now this might have had something to do with Evelyn’s nature. Evelyn did not see things the way most people saw them. Everything was always so fresh and interesting to her, she was so often amazed and pleased by what she saw, for certain peculiar and unpredictable reasons of her own, that she would stop short in the middle of what she was doing, marveling at it, incapable of going on to anything else very quickly, so that even her meals reflected this, and were either incomplete, because she had gotten no further than one amazing food or one amazing dish, or complete, but served hours later than she had said she would serve them because she stopped and spent so long contemplating each part of them. She did not judge things, or her judgments were not harsh, or they did not have anything to do with the judgments of other people. So that, in her presence, everything seemed to be full of wonderful possibilities, and that afternoon I felt that what we had just then was entirely satisfying and good.

His life apart from me was not very real to me. He did not force me to pay much attention to it, because he was too modest or, if not truly modest, spoke of himself only briefly and then left the subject as though something would be lost or harmed if he dwelled on it for too long.

I did not know exactly what he did when he was away from me. I could imagine him alone in his room. I could see him working at a job, and the job was always menial, and demeaning. I could see him in his garage. Then there were the tedious daily things he must have done some of the time he was not with me, such as shop for food, cook, clean his apartment, wash his clothes. I could form only a vague picture of him with his friends, who were unknown to me, who lived in rooms in unknown places in the city. Most of his friends were as young as he was, and because I did not regard people of that age as very interesting, even though I had been that age myself, they tended to merge for me into an undifferentiated group. When I pictured him in their company he seemed much younger, as though they were his playmates and I were his aunt — not quite his mother, though his actual mother was herself so young, as I had discovered, so young that she seemed, even to him, like an older sister.

I didn’t know how much time he spent with his friends, since he didn’t always tell me he had seen them or, if he told me, give me any idea how long he had been with them. I couldn’t really believe that anything important took place when they were together. My impression was that he and his friends only sat somewhere and talked to each other in a way that didn’t add anything to them or change them but only marked time while they grew a little older and perhaps more capable of undergoing interesting changes, and that this talk went on in a room, an apartment, a house, a campus bar, or a student center — in a private place or a university place, but not a public place in town, such as the café where he met his older friend.

This was the one friend who might have interested me, an eccentric, reclusive man vaguely associated in my mind with literature, who was nearly an old man or was an old man, to my way of thinking at the time, though I now realize that he was probably no older than sixty, and of course, as I begin to approach fifty myself, sixty seems younger and younger to me. He would meet this friend in the café or go see him where he lived in a mysterious part of town which I imagined to be the heart of the oldest part, a part even older, perhaps, than was possible in that town, most of which was not very old. Perhaps I imagined it older and older the more I thought of it, just because I had so little idea where it was.

This friend lived in a single, small room crowded with bookshelves and books, and permeated with the stale smell of unwashed clothing and the strong, bitter smell of tobacco — or, since I never went to visit him myself, did I only imagine this when I imagined an old man living alone? I also saw the old man as bearded and a little plump around the waist, thighs, arms, and cheeks, but I don’t know if he told me this or if I instantly formed this picture of the man when he first told me he was visiting a bookish old man in a small room filled with books, and never questioned the picture, so that it registered in my mind as the truth.

Actually, many years before, I had known another bookish old man who was visited by another ardent young man, and maybe I simply applied the picture I knew to this old man.

Although this friend was more interesting to me than his young friends, and raised him a little in my estimation, while his young friends and what he might possibly be doing with them only lowered him, my interest in this friend was still very limited, because the friendship seemed not entirely innocent to me but contaminated, as I saw it, by his self-consciousness, as though he knew how touching it might be that an idealistic and ambitious and talented young man should have a friendship with a much older, poorer, better-educated man, in the presence of whom the younger man’s vanity would drop away and he would become pure and even good, or at least feel pure and good. Because I was sure that alongside his real interest in the old man was his awareness of himself visiting the old man, himself at the knees of an old man who had set himself apart from society, the pleasure he might bring to an isolated old man as he freely shared his youth, his freshness, his quick mind, his gentle manners. And he shared these things freely, because there could be no danger of any lasting hold, since his youth itself gave him permission not only to forget the old man for weeks at a time, distracted by the enormous effort of making or beginning some kind of life for himself, but also to move on abruptly and permanently, leaving him behind when the time came to go. So, although there was real tenderness and happiness in his voice when he spoke of him, it was mixed with a naïve elation, a naïve pride in the fact that he owned such an unusual and precious jewel as this friendship with an eccentric, smelly old man awake in the night and asleep in the day, belonging more to the East or even to Europe than to the West, and certainly nothing like the people we saw around us on the palm-lined streets of these seaside towns.

Now it comes back to me that several of the friends he saw were connected with the theater in town, although I’m not sure if they were students or professional actors, directors, or stagehands. I remember that when he talked to me about the theater and these friends, his tone was firmer, more confident, as though he hoped or expected that I would be impressed by this, at least, by the fact that friends of his, who evidently respected him, were involved in something as compelling as a theater performance. But I’m not sure my interest and respect could have been aroused by anything in his life except the very same things and people that aroused my interest and respect in my own life.

For instance, I know I respected him for having read certain books, and read them so closely and in such an orderly way, but these were always books that I myself intended to read. And I respected him for the way he wrote.

I would not have wanted to spend much time, anyway, or maybe any time at all, with his young friends, who were so much younger that I would have felt like an old woman or their teacher and they would have been respectful toward me as though I were their teacher.

But once we went to a play together and I met a few of them, though I have only a fleeting image of the inside of the theater, in fact only a corner of it near the front door, and a memory of shaking hands with a collection of people he knew.

I don’t know if it was on that day that we went out to a café afterward or if there was one more visit to the theater together, after which we met a friend of his, went to a bar or café for beer, and talked about plays and movies. But I never particularly enjoyed talking about plays or movies. And I was never very interested in the theater. He wanted to write for the theater. Just before we lost touch completely, he told me he had been given a scholarship to go to drama school. It was a scholarship he had been hoping to get, yet he told me he had decided not to take it. If he took it, he said, his life would be too easy. The reasons he gave me could have been the real reasons, or they could have been reasons invented or exaggerated to impress me. If they were the real reasons, I was impressed by them, but at the same time I was aware that they might not be the real reasons.

I did not know if he wanted me to know his young friends. I knew he wished I would be more playful with him, and not so serious, because he would sometimes tell me explicitly: “I wish you would play with me more.” And I knew he wished we would spend more time where he lived. But I was more comfortable surrounded by my own things, close to the things I could do and the things of mine that interested me.

For the same reason, I think, I almost never rode in his car. I told him I did not want to ride in it because the roar from the broken muffler was so loud, but now, of course, that does not seem to be a very good reason. I could have put up with the deafening roar, or even enjoyed it, if I hadn’t been afraid of being consumed by his world, if I hadn’t clung stubbornly to my own — my own car, my own house, my own town, and my own friends.

I have been trying to remember the inside of it. I see something red in it, but I don’t know if this was his plaid jacket, or a blanket he kept in the car, or the seats. I am almost certain the air inside was heavy with the musty smell of a very old car, of the dried leather of the seats or the stuffing inside them, and that this smell was overlaid with a smell of fresh laundry, since his clothes were always fresh. And I am certain that the back seat of it and even the front seat were cluttered with clothes and books, notebooks, loose paper, pens, pencils, sports equipment, and other odds and ends. I know that after he lost his second apartment, when he was sleeping in his girlfriend’s apartment but had no place to put his things, he carried all his clothes around with him in the car and probably other things besides, whatever would fit.

Yet after he left me I used to look for his car all the time, so constantly and for so many months that I never quite lost the habit afterward of noticing cars like his, and the car began to assume its own independent life, became a living creature, a kind of animal, a pet, a pet dog, friendly, loyal, or a strange dog, menacing, vicious.

* * *

It surprised me, over and over, to find that I was with such a young man. He was twenty-two when I met him. He turned twenty-three while I knew him, but by the time I turned thirty-five I did not know where he was anymore.

The idea that he was twelve years younger interested me. I did not know if I was moving back through those twelve years to be with him, or if he was moving up through them to be with me, if I was his future or he was my past. I sometimes thought I was repeating an experience I had had a long time before: once again I was with an idealistic, ambitious, talented young man, as I had been when I was that young myself, but now, because I was older, I had a confidence and an influence over him that I had not had with that other young man. But there was also a distance between us because of this that would not have been there otherwise.

I said to him that it made me feel younger than I was, to be with him, and he said it made him feel older to be with me. But of course the reverse must have been true at the same time: I felt even older than I actually was, by contrast with him, and he felt even younger. He must have been uncomfortable about how old I was, some of the time, because it made him so careful about what he said when he was talking about things I knew well, but at the same time this difference in age must have made him feel more sophisticated.

He told me he was afraid of saying something that would make him seem young in my eyes. I realize now what an effort it must have been for him, each time he spoke, to imagine, before he opened his mouth, what would seem young to me, and to avoid saying it.

I knew more than he did, at least about certain things, and now and then I corrected him when he said something wrong. I wasn’t used to knowing more than another person. I wasn’t used to feeling I knew much of anything at all. I knew more only because I had lived twelve years longer. More knowledge was in me, not because I went after it and held on to it the way he did, but because it had accumulated in me as though against my will.

He was embarrassed or uncomfortable that I knew more. But what I saw was that our minds were simply different, and his opened out over its own territory and mine over its own territory, and one was not richer than the other. But he wanted to be able to teach me things, he told me, he wanted to be able to help me, even find a job for me, though I had a job already. He wanted to find me a job, but he couldn’t have found me a job, he couldn’t even find a job for himself at that time. More than once, he said he wanted to take me away somewhere. I don’t remember if he named any other place but Europe and the desert. But we never went to the desert, and he couldn’t have taken me to Europe, he couldn’t afford to take me anywhere.

A friend of mine once told me about a love affair he had had with a woman much older. He, too, had wanted to take her away to a place where nothing would distract her and she would belong entirely to him, a place so inaccessible it was almost imaginary. As he told me the story from beginning to end, with all its details, I saw other similarities, though I said nothing to him: their first night together also began with a moment at which shoes were taken off, though in his case, she asked him to take off her shoes, and he took them off in her bedroom. She was the one, in this case, who worked at a gas station, and after she ended their love affair, he was the one who would go find her at the gas station and argue with her — though I am sure that since he is a gentler person than I am, he was not as persistent.

My friend told me he could not stop writing down certain things about it. He could not speak to her because she would not listen to him, so he wrote things about it that other people would read, so that she might read it, too, and be not only affected by it but more affected because it was public. If she was not, he would at least have the satisfaction of telling it all out loud, and also of turning that love affair, which had not lasted as long as he had wanted it to, into something that would last longer.

* * *

It was as though I were taking part in the very beginning of his life, his life as an adult, and this was exciting to me. There was a simple strength in him that had to do with his youth, a pure vigor, and a sense of limitless possibilities, which was something that would change, I thought, in twelve years. In the beginning there was every possibility, I thought, and over the years some of those possibilities disappeared. I did not mind that, but I liked being with a person who hadn’t gone through it yet.

But now and then I needed to talk to someone who had experienced those twelve years and arrived at the same sort of point with the same sorts of conclusions I had, and then I wanted to be with people my own age, and I would even go so far as to turn away from him, if we were at a table in a restaurant, and toward people my own age, and when I was in that mood, if he spoke to me I would turn to him to answer, but immediately turn away again, as though he were a contagion, or as though I were afraid of being pulled back into his youth, of losing my grip on my own age and my own generation, slipping back through those years to an innocence or freshness that also had a certain helplessness attached to it. I did not want that youth for myself. I only wanted it there with me, at arm’s reach, in him.

Yet the fact of leaving him out so pointedly, at these times, also made me more intensely aware of him at my side either sitting silent, stunned by my rudeness, and listening to the conversation or thinking his own thoughts, or overlooking my rudeness and talking to the person on his other side, so that mingled with my uneasiness at what I was doing was an intensified pleasure in his proximity, as though the fact of leaving him out, having him next to me but behind me, only increased my sense of how close to me he was, a richness still intact. It was as though refusing, for a moment, the pleasure he and I took in each other only further concentrated it. But he must have been aware of this division in my feelings for him, and must have been hurt by it.

* * *

One evening I hadn’t expected to see him, either because he was busy himself or for some other reason, and I had asked Mitchell to come have dinner with Madeleine and me. We had finished eating and were still sitting at the table in the arcade by the terrace, Mitchell talking about a recent trip, when he came through the gate and across the terrace to us. The sight of him provoked a sharp feeling of annoyance in me, because I did not want to see him just then, but he must not have suspected that I could feel anything like that. Quite comfortably, he sat down with us and listened while Mitchell finished telling us about his trip. After Mitchell went home, he took me down the hill to the bar at the bottom of my street, to meet a teacher of his whom he admired very much. Two other students were present also. My feeling of annoyance only continued, and increased, as I sat there vehemently disliking both this teacher and his students, who paid such close attention to him they barely seemed to see or hear anything else. But I don’t know if my dislike of those three men fed my annoyance at him, so that it did not dissipate all evening, or if I disliked them so vehemently only because I was already annoyed.

Now that I have remembered this teacher, whom I had forgotten, I also remember that he lived farther up the hill and a little to the south of me in that same town, and that he used to hold his classes at his house, so that his students, in small seminars, would gather there.

And I recall that this was another place he might be in the evening, before he came to me at the end of the evening, whether he was actually a student in the class or he was only occasionally invited to join the others. And when I recall a specific place he might have been, then it is easier for me to hear him, again, telling me he would come by at the end of the evening from that specific place, and it is easier for me to remember how the knowledge of where he was and the plan we had, the prospect of his coming later, was as distinct, as perceptible, and as sweet as a piece of ripe fruit near me, within sight, and within reach, as I worked comfortably through the evening, beginning to listen, toward the end of it, for the sound of his car and then the sound of his footsteps by the gate.

* * *

When he was silent with me I found his silence difficult and uncomfortable. I am almost certain he was silent because he was afraid to speak, afraid that I would think what he said was wrong — inaccurate, or not very intelligent, or not very interesting. Even when I did not mean to be unkind to him, I was unkind, and made him afraid to speak.

His silence hid things, as his face hid things, what was in his mind and what he was feeling, and forced me to look at him more attentively, to try to search out what lay behind his silence. He never explained himself, unlike another man I had known who explained himself so fully that I never had to guess. I guessed at his reasons, I guessed at his thoughts, but when I asked him if I was right in my guesses, he did not answer me and I had to guess further, whether I had been right.

This kept my attention on him, but at times I became impatient. I knew I should not be impatient with his silence, or with his indirect way of doing things, or with his slower way of doing things, and yet I was. I wanted everything to be quick, most of the time, except when I chose it to be slow. I simply wanted everything to be the way I chose it to be, quick or slow.

If I look at how impatient I was with him, I have to wonder about the way I loved him. I think I was irresponsible in handling his love. I forgot it, ignored it, abused it. Only occasionally, and almost by chance, or on a whim, did I honor or protect it. Maybe I only wanted to be entrusted with his love: then I was willing to let him suffer, because I was safe in the trust of that love and did not suffer myself.

It was not easy for me to speak to him, either. I wanted to speak, and my voice spoke inside me, I thought of the words to say and said them, but what I said was dry and stiff, the words did not communicate anything of what I was feeling. It was easier for me to touch him and to write things down.

So there was sometimes this strange formality between us, a vacancy and difficulty, because of the awkwardness of what he said to me when he spoke, and the awkwardness of what I said to him, and the vast silences that fell between us. Maybe we did not have to talk, but when we were together we must have felt we should have something like a conversation. We tried over and over again to talk, and did it badly, there were so many barriers in the way.

Other things about him bothered me, and he must have known that. I was uneasy if he sat very silent in company with other people, or if he made a remark that showed he had not understood what was being talked about, his enunciation clearest when he was most nervous, his t’s noticeably crisp, or if he laughed in his self-conscious way, his voice tense and rising. Even his smile, broad as it was every time, seemed tense and self-conscious, as though he were offering himself to me then, standing behind his smile and behind his wide body, so straight and tense and quiet. I thought his body was unusually wide, his arms and legs unusually thick. I thought his skin was strangely white, the flesh of his limbs so wide and white it almost shone in the dark. It did shine in a dim light, in a darkened room with light coming in through the windows from the moon or a streetlamp. He was certainly nice-looking, his features were agreeable, but his nose was oddly pointed and upturned in his wide face, the skin of his face was pale, pink, and freckled, even his lips were freckled. He often fell into one self-conscious pose or another, his head thrown back, smiling or wary, or his head bowed, when he was not smiling and seemed angry, or ready to fight, but was not angry, looking up at me from under his eyebrows, his lips tight shut. I could not say his eyes did not have a pretty color of blue in them, though even the blue was very pale, and the whites often a little bloodshot.

When we were no longer together, what had bothered me did not bother me anymore. It was harder for me to see anything wrong with him, because although the same things were there, they had shrunk, in my attention, to a point where they were barely visible.

* * *

I have been counting things today. I have been counting quarrels and trips. I need to put more order into what I remember. The order is difficult. It has been the most difficult thing about this book. Actually, my doubt has been more difficult, but my doubt about the order has been the worst. I don’t mind working hard, but I don’t like not knowing what I am doing, or not knowing if what I am doing is the right thing to do.

I have tried to find a good order, but my thoughts are not orderly — one is interrupted by another, or one contradicts another, and in addition to that, my memories are quite often false, confused, abbreviated, or collapsed into one another.

I have trouble organizing things in my life anyway. I don’t have the patience to try very hard. One reason this book has taken so long to write is that instead of thinking it through and organizing it beforehand, I have simply kept trying, blindly and impulsively, to write it in ways that weren’t possible. Then I have had to go back and try to write it in a different way. I have made many mistakes, and couldn’t see them until after I had made them.

I still find myself forgetting things I had intended to do, and doing things I had not planned to do. I find myself doing things sooner than I had planned to do them: Oh, I say to myself, so I’m already at this stage.

I complained to Ellie a few weeks ago that although the novel was intended to be short, it had been growing and growing and was clearly going to become quite long before I could cut it down to the size it should be. But she said this seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to proceed. She had done the same thing with her dissertation all those many years ago, she said. That reassured me for a while. But now I am worried all over again. If it grows any more, will I still have time to cut it back before I run out of money?

I can’t stop translating altogether. Recently I tried to figure out how much money I spent each month, how much I had on hand at present, and how much I needed to earn over the next few months to supplement that. Pleased with myself, I went downstairs and explained to Vincent that I seemed to spend about $2,300 per month, and had enough to last for about a year if I translated just a little. But Vincent reminded me that my calculations are often wrong. I often forget what he calls hidden costs. And I forget that I will have to pay taxes on what I earn.

I am not very good at managing my money. One problem is that when I’m paid for my work, the payment always comes in a single lump sum so large it seems limitless. I begin spending it, and each thing I buy seems to be the only thing I will buy, each small sum seems like the only sum. I don’t understand that one sum will be added to the next until the original sum is all gone.

Now and then a day comes when I have almost nothing left, and no prospect of work either. I am afraid. It is not that Vincent would not try to make up the difference if I ran out of money altogether, but if I don’t pay a share of our expenses we can’t maintain what we have. At this point I look at what money is left and at last, because I have no choice, make a budget and try to live within it.

Sometimes, then, the phone rings and I hear the voice of a cheerful person who wants to pay me to translate a book. Because I speak to her in a calm, professional way, she has no idea of the despair that had surrounded me until that moment, there at the other end of the line.

I’m not tired of translating, though I probably should be. Maybe I should also be embarrassed that I’m still translating after all these years. People seem surprised that a woman my age is a translator, as though it is not wrong to translate when you are still a student, or just out of school, but you should have stopped by the time you are older. Or it is fine to translate poetry but not prose. Or it is all right to translate prose if you do it as a pastime or a hobby. One person I know, for instance, does not have to translate anymore, and that is one of the many signs that he is now a successful writer. He will occasionally translate something small, like a poem, but only to oblige an old friend.

Part of it may be that translators are paid by the word, so the more carefully they work on a translation, the less they are paid for their time, which means that if they are very careful they may not earn much. And often, the more interesting or unusual the book, the more painstaking they have to be. For one or two difficult books, I took so long over each page that I earned less than a dollar an hour. But I’m not sure this explains why so many people do not respect translators or would simply prefer not to think about them.

If I am at a party and I say to a man that I’m a translator, he often loses interest immediately and prepares to move on and talk to someone else. But in fact I have done the same thing to other translators at parties, usually other women. At first I talk to the woman with enthusiasm, because there is so much I have wanted to say about translating to a person who understands the work, things I have thought about a great deal and have kept to myself because I don’t often meet another translator. Then my enthusiasm slowly dies, because everything she says to me in reply is a complaint, and I see that she has no joy in translating — no interest in her own work and no interest in me or my work either.

One woman I remember even looked like me, or like what I think I look like until I go and look in the mirror again. She had very long, straight, light brown hair held back from her face by two small barrettes, she wore glasses, she was tall and thin, she had regular features that might have been pleasant if her expression had not been so dull, and she wore neat but drab clothes of no particular style, maybe a colorless sweater and a plain skirt. The main impression she made on me was one of dullness, narrowness, and dissatisfaction. Maybe this is how I appear to others. Maybe I seem too dull and full of complaints, though I think I am too enthusiastic, if anything. But maybe my enthusiasm is worse, because to them it is enthusiasm about dull things.

I complained to another friend about my confusion over this book. He had asked me a direct and clear question, like “How far along are you?” or “How much do you have left to do?” as though I should be able to answer that. He said he always knew exactly how much he had left to do on a book. He said he wrote about a page a day and always knew that he had, say, 100 pages left to write. Only one book of his, he said, was confusing, and for that book he had made elaborate diagrams. But I feel I would lose too much time if I stopped to do that, even though I should know I lose more time by not doing it.

Yesterday, for about an hour, I thought I understood what to do. I thought: Just take out the parts you don’t like. That way, everything that is left will probably be good. But then another voice spoke up. It is a voice that often interrupts me to confuse me. It said I shouldn’t be too quick to eliminate things. Maybe they only needed to be rewritten, it said. Or moved to a different spot. Moving a sentence to a different spot could change everything. And changing just a single word in a bad sentence could make it good. In fact, changing a punctuation mark could do that. So then I thought I would have to keep moving each thing and rewriting it until I was sure it did not belong anywhere and could take it out.

Then again, maybe there is nothing that does not belong in, and this novel is like a puzzle with a difficult solution. If I were clever and patient enough, I could find it. When I do a difficult crossword, I never quite finish it, but I usually don’t remember to look at the solution when it appears. I have been working on this puzzle so long by now that I catch myself thinking it is time to look at the solution, as though I will only have to dig through a pile of papers to find it. I have the same sort of frustration, at times, with a problem in a translation. I ask, Now, what is the answer? — as though it existed somewhere. Maybe the answer is what will occur to me later, when I look back.

Because of the kind of puzzle this is, though, no one else will ever know that a few more things belonged in the novel and were left out because I did not know where to put them.

This is not the only thing I’m afraid of. I’m afraid I may realize after the novel is finished that what actually made me want to write it was something different, and that it should have taken a different direction. But by then I will not be able to go back and change it, so the novel will remain what it is and the other novel, the one that should have been written, will never be written.

* * *

There were five quarrels, I think. The first was in the car after the reading. The second was just after we returned from a trip up the coast together. I can’t remember what that one was about, only that we had not quite made it up when the piano tuner arrived to tune my piano, walking through the fine brown dirt of the driveway carrying his black satchel and whistling a song from a popular Broadway show.

There were two trips up the coast that I can remember, one to a large city where we bought books and one to visit that cousin of mine who took us sailing.

There were two trips out on boats together, one on my cousin’s sailboat and one on a whale-watching boat with an older man who ignored me almost completely. I have not so far included the whale watching, the sailing, or the trip to the city, where we had dinner in a crowded restaurant with our bags of new books by our feet.

I went off on three trips by myself. One was for a weekend. The second was for three weeks in early winter, when my term of teaching was over. We wrote letters to each other and spoke on the phone once or twice. The last trip, and the longest, came at the end of winter. I called him a few times and wrote him one letter that never reached him. That was when I was staying in a borrowed apartment and he was living above the cactus nursery.

The third quarrel was more serious than the first or the second, and occurred five days after the quarrel that was interrupted by the piano tuner. I was about to go off on the first of my trips away from him, the shortest one. I think he was angry at me for going away, no matter how good my reasons were, and this was why, the evening before I went, he left a brief message with Madeleine, who passed it on to me indignantly. In this message he told me he couldn’t see me despite a plan we had had. He did not explain.

He spent that evening with Kitty instead, first going to the movies with her and then talking to her in his room. He said she had a problem and needed to talk to him. I kept calling him until I reached him, then I quarreled with him on the phone, then I called him again, and at last, though it was so late, I got into my car and drove to where he lived. I wanted to be with him even if only for a short time.

Because of the lateness of the hour, or the absurdity of what I was doing, my lack of dignity, the fact that I had had to change out of my nightgown and back into my clothes to do this, or for some other reason, when I came to the long, wide curve of road around the racetrack parking lot, heading toward the trailer camp and within sight, in the distance, of the highway with its pairs of yellow lights moving down the coast and red lights moving up the coast, and I could see far up the train tracks a train coming south, with its single headlight and its two long tines of reflected light shining down the straight tracks at me, with nothing but darkness and emptiness on either side of me, layer upon layer of different shades of darkness and emptiness, only enough light just here to see the dark side of the hill beyond the barbed fence, beyond the dirt flat, beyond the channel of brown water, I felt I was no longer observing this landscape, but that, instead, it was now observing me: I was the only moving thing right here, by this empty lot, and I was suddenly turned back on myself, as though reflected by the landscape, and forced to see what I was doing at this moment.

But no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing, I would go on doing it, as though I simply allowed my shame to sit there alongside my need to do it, one separate from the other. I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than to do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted.

I was traveling that mile up the coast with only one purpose, to consume that mile and reach the other end of it. I found him, but he wouldn’t let me into his room. We talked outside, and he apologized. I drove back home and went off on my trip the next morning without being sure what was true and what was not, about his story.

It was Thanksgiving Day. I was flying to a city north of us, the same city, in fact, where years later I spent most of one afternoon looking for his latest address, though of course in my memory there are two cities, quite different. Not long after I arrived, I was taken to a house I had never been to before, and then later that night I was taken, in the dark, through streets I didn’t know, to another house I had never been to before. It was a cottage that stood by itself back from the street over the distance of a very large lawn, a full city lot, I think, unless the size of the lawn has grown in my memory over time. I did not know where I was in the city and I had not known I would be going there.

I was left there, and no one else was in the house but someone’s teenage son sleeping upstairs, whom I never saw, either that night or the next morning, so that I seemed to be alone in the house. I felt not only the hours separating me from him but the succession of strange places, too, as though the more hours passed and the more strange places I went into, the farther I moved from him, and I would have to go back through that time and each of those places to find him again. Then, though it was late, the phone rang, and when I answered it, what I heard in the receiver was his voice. He could not know where I was, I thought, since even I did not know where I was. He could not have called me. But he had found me, simply because he wanted to find me.

The same sort of thing had happened a few weeks earlier, when I had wanted more than anything else to hold him in my arms, and thought he was somewhere else and with other people. I had opened a door to go out into a hall and he was there in front of me, waiting for me.

It was at times like these, and maybe only at times like these, when I was away from him and wanted to be with him, that there was no confusion in me and I didn’t hold anything back from him.

I returned home two days later and found a small bunch of blue flowers on the piano and a note from him saying he was waiting for me down the hill, at the bar. All I had to do was choose the moment to go, wash my face and hands, walk down the hill, and find him in the crowded place, where he would be sitting on a stool, one of a row of backs, a close line of people shoulder to shoulder, his back, when he turned to look for me, pressing against the back of another man, as I made my way through the crowd to him. Then I would have him in my arms, where I wanted him.

But even so, I put off the moment a little, I looked through my mail and opened a few letters before I went down the hill. I held that moment a short distance away, maybe in order to enjoy it just where it was, in the near future. In fact, maybe I was happiest in exactly that situation, having him nearby, having the prospect of him there before me, feeling the desire to be so close to him that nothing separated us, and knowing I would be able to satisfy it at any moment I chose. It was a perfectly secure position, untouched by any trouble, any conflict or contradiction, and I had the time to savor it. Nothing could disturb it, except to try to stay in it too long.

And when I realize that, I go on to consider that maybe what I found so intolerable after he left me was not the obvious thing, that he and I were no longer together, that I was alone, but rather the less obvious, that I no longer had that wonderful possibility available to me, of going to find him wherever he was and being welcomed by him. I wanted to go find him but did not know where he was, and if I knew where he was, and found him, I was not welcomed by him.

* * *

When he had appeared suddenly, as though brought by the force of my wanting him there, in the hall outside the door, a party was going on in my house. It was a party he and I were giving together, although I can’t remember if there was any particular reason for it. There were many people in the house. We were trying to roast pieces of chicken to feed these people, but we had not planned it right and were not fast enough. So many people crowded around and tried to eat or waited or asked to eat that we became almost frightened by their hunger. We were roasting the chicken outside on the terrace, on a grill built of stone, and over and over again we turned the soft flesh of the chicken with its gleam of fat in the dim light from inside the house, but the chicken would not cook. Some of the people ate, at last, and others never did, and as the hour moved on, the hunger of all these people was satisfied or not satisfied but forgotten. The next morning there was a pleasant smell of beer in the rooms, and piles of crumbs from crushed bread here and there on the tiles, and someone’s felt hat left behind on a table.

* * *

Soon after I returned from my weekend trip, I went to see him in his garage. I had not gone there very often. I did not ask how he worked or when he worked. I would have asked, or maybe I had asked once, but there must have been something in the way he answered, maybe too briefly, that made me think he did not like me to ask.

I came away with a few books I had been wanting to read. I put these books on the shelf in the alcove above my bed alongside the other books I had recently acquired: the books given to me on my trip and the books I had bought with him a few days before.

I looked at their spines often. The colors of their spines, and the few words of their titles, naming other possible visions of the world, were always part of what I saw in the room, and I always liked to have these signs of other worlds near me, even if for months or years I did not open the books, even if there were many I never read but packed into boxes and unpacked again, over and over, taking them with me from one place to the next. Some, in fact, I still have on shelves here in this house, still unread.

When I visited him in his garage, he showed me more closely what he had in this place where he worked, and I was impressed by the books, not knowing, yet, that most of them were not his. The garage was larger than his room in the back of the building. Harsh yellow light shone over the concrete walls and the tall bookcases that stood strangely in rows in the middle of the space. He stepped lightly and easily around the bookcases, showing me how he had arranged the books. He never wasted his motions. He moved, and yet always seemed still. He paused before he moved, then moved economically and deliberately, whereas I often hurled myself at things, stumbled, and was awkward. He seemed to think economically, too, as though he also paused before he thought, as he also paused before he spoke. Of course even pausing and taking care, he sometimes said something wrong, or clumsy, and I thought of the way a cornered animal will pause and then, with its perfectly developed instincts, make a move that should be successful but is not, because there are elements in the situation the animal has not understood and could not have understood.

I did not visit him in his garage again after that, as far as I can remember. I did not help him move, when he moved a month or two later from that place to the rooms overlooking the concrete yard of a nursery full of potted cactuses. I can’t remember just when that move was. I think I was away, I think I had gone back East. There was a dispute surrounding the move. Either he owed rent, or the landlord did not like him, or a friend came back and claimed the place, or that friend or a different friend was angry about the books, either that they had been left behind in the garage or that they had not been left, or that the landlord had kept them, or that they had been damaged, or that some were missing.

* * *

I noticed even then, before I was angry at him myself, long before Ellie told me the story of another woman who was deeply insulted by a proposition of his, something he offered to do for her in exchange for money, that many people seemed to get angry at him. Certainly in any sort of business arrangement, anything involving practical matters or money, sooner or later he did not do the right thing and caused disturbance in the person he was dealing with. In the beginning, he would make a good impression, as for instance on a landlord, since he was neat and clean, friendly and intelligent, and good-looking in an open, unassuming way, and the landlord would be pleased with the arrangement and well-disposed toward him. But then he would be late with a rent payment, or offer only a part of it and then miss one altogether, and the landlord would be first puzzled, then nervous, then angry, and then adamant in asking him to leave.

He had been quick to pay back the first loan I made him, the $100, but he did not pay back the $300 I lent him later, enough to have his muffler fixed, probably because by the time I returned he had left me, so the debt was not something that might come between us but something he would want to forget, just as he would want to forget me, too, as quickly as possible, put me behind him and move on.

I realized later that he went to a woman and became attached to her in somewhat the same way that he moved into an apartment and lived there a few months and then moved out again after some unpleasantness with the landlord, always defaulting on the rent and owing money. He needed to stay with her and become part of her, not lose himself completely, but not keep himself entirely separate either. Then, after a time, he left her and became attached to another woman.

A woman anchored him in the real world, connected him to something. Without her, he floated. He did not keep track of the passing hours or the passing days very well, anyway, he did not plan how to make money or spend it or save it, or if he did, his plans were not connected to anything very real, though he kept himself clean and neat, and began projects and worked at them hard, and was a hard worker, if he did not often finish them.

He did not always know what he was doing or how to plan what he had to do, and in the same way, he sometimes did not know what he was saying, or did not think about how it related to the last thing he had said, or to what he was doing, or to the true situation, so that there was often a lack of connection between one thing and another in his conversation and in his life. Many of the things he said to me were not true, and even more were not what he meant to say. He did not always know what he was saying because his mind was often on something else. Once he told me he made Portuguese fish soup very well, then corrected himself and said that he had never made it but believed he could make it very well. Sometimes he said something he thought was true but said it in such a strange way that it did not express what he meant to say. Sometimes he was simply confused or mistaken. Some things he said wrong out of nervousness and then either heard what he had said or did not hear. Some things he deliberately distorted or exaggerated. Sometimes he deliberately lied.

When I first knew him, I did not know that he could lie, so I believed everything he said. Later, when I looked back at what he had said, knowing he could lie, I had to wonder which thing was true and which was not. And each thing I doubted made me change what I thought I knew about him.

* * *

I think he wanted to forget me as well as the money he owed me, even though he did send me that French poem a year after I last saw him. Sending it could have been a momentary impulse. Maybe the memory of me broke through his cloud of forgetfulness briefly and was then swallowed up again, so that by the time he received my answer, if he ever received it, he was once again inclined to forget me and only read it quickly, suppressed anything he felt reading it, and put it away to be forgotten as soon as possible — not deliberately in a drawer or a box, and not in the wastebasket, but in a place on his table or desk where it would look like something he intended to answer, but would be buried by other papers, mislaid, and eventually forgotten.

When I received that poem from him I read it through once quickly, then several times more that day, until I understood most of it, and after that I could not take it out of its envelope again, as though it had too much power, as though the force of it was safe enough in the envelope, but not safe once it was out and unfolded.

Just now I have taken the poem out again and have been looking through different anthologies to see if I can find it and identify it. I found it once before, quite by accident, so I thought that when I next needed to, I would be able to find it easily. It is probably a well-known poem, or at least this was my impression after I found it by accident. It is probably one I should know, or one other people would think I should know because of my profession, but my knowledge of French literature is surprisingly poor, as is my knowledge of French history. Oddly enough, this doesn’t usually affect the quality of my work. At worst I will miss only one or two references. But now and then it has embarrassed me.

The poem is a sonnet, and begins with the word Nous. I looked in the index of first lines of the book where I had been certain, all this time, that I would find it and saw only other first lines beginning with the word Nous, in the literal translations offered by the book: We two have our hands to give. We have a clergy, some lime. We will not always live in these yellow lands. I did not find the line I was looking for, which would be something like: We have thought pure things. I gave up, for the time being.

Then a peculiar thing happened. I watched, as though from a distance, while my two hands put his letter back in its envelope. I did not handle it carefully, almost reverently, as I had a short time before when I took it out, but hastily, and carelessly, because I was frustrated that I had not found out what the poem was. And because I am so used to seeing my hands do this every day to other letters, I believed, or some independent part of my brain believed, for an instant, that this was a letter I had just received, just brought home from the post office to open at my desk. Now his handwriting on the envelope suddenly had a sense of purpose and immediacy all over again — the letter seemed to be a real, active communication.

Then the instant passed, or the part of my brain that knew the truth caught up with the part that had believed something different for an instant. Once again, the letter had the faded permanence, the immutability, of a relic.

The letter is one of a small collection of things here in my room that seem to have some life of their own. Relics, they are heavier, or more magnetic, than the other objects in the house. Besides the poem he sent, and his story, the photograph of him, other letters, and a page he and I wrote together, on which his handwriting alternates with mine, there is a blanket he left in my house, a plaid shirt he gave me, a second plaid shirt whose sleeves are so frayed they have fallen into rags, and at least three books. One of the books is a novel by Faulkner that I read after he left me, a paperback so old that its pages are yellow and its outer margins brown, its glue so brittle that each page, after I had read it and turned it, fell quietly off the spine, and because I did not close the book whenever I put it aside, but left it lying open face up on the windowsill by my bed, not really a bound book any longer but two piles, one of bound pages and one of loose pages, the book did not close on the story, and the story remained present in the room while I was reading the book and for many days after, as if it were loose in the room, had floated up from the pages, and hung there under the raftered ceiling — the woman’s sullen illness, the thrashing of the wild palms around the prison where the man sits, the high wind, the wide river the man can see out the cell window, the frail cigarette that he can’t roll tightly because his hands tremble so badly.

* * *

I thought the feeling of emptiness and bleakness did not appear until February. I thought it was mild. The truth is, it appeared in December, before I went East for the first time. In fact, it had been present before then, even close to the beginning, but in the beginning it did not matter. Because I went away, in December, and came back again, I forgot my uneasiness. I missed him and then I had him back. But in February it reappeared, and was acute, and went on day after day.

There were two trips East, but I don’t know if I will describe the first one first and the second one second, because today I am feeling that chronological order is not a good thing, even if it is easier, and that I should break it up. Is it that when these events are in chronological order they are not propelled forward by cause and effect, by need and satisfaction, they do not spring ahead with their own energy but are simply dragged forward by the passage of time?

Or is it only that I am irritable today? I have to be careful, because there are days when I am so irritable that not only do I want to disrupt the chronological order, I also want to delete a great deal of what I have written. Take this sentence out, I say to myself, with a kind of furious pleasure, and that paragraph, too — I never liked or respected it.

But if I give in to all these impulses when I am in a bad mood, I will have almost nothing left.

At such times, the irritation I feel toward the writing is just as personal as the irritation I feel when the old man gets stubborn and I come up against the blank wall of his refusal, or during an argument with Vincent when he will not listen to me but either rolls his eyes up at the ceiling or closes them or looks at the newspaper. As though I think this novel has a life and will of its own and is simply refusing to do what I want it to do.

I don’t always trust myself, because I have never tried to write a novel before. At first I thought this novel should be like the sort of novel I admire. But then I realized that of course I admire more than one sort of novel. For a while, I thought it should be like the novel I was translating at the time he left me, not because that was what I was doing then, but because I admire that novel. But if I took that as my model, I would have to cut out most of what happens in this one. In that novel, the characters only walk in and out of rooms, look through doorways, arrive at apartments, go up and down stairs, look out windows from inside, look in windows from outside, and make brief remarks to each other that are hard to understand.

For a while after that, I wanted this to have the same high moral tone as the work of another writer I admire, but it won’t, because I don’t have the same strong moral principles he does.

My uneasiness in December was sometimes boredom, and sometimes, at its worst, a panic at being trapped in the empty space of our silence or the awkwardness of the way we tried to talk to each other.

Once, we were alone together in a restaurant and I was becoming exhausted by the effort of sitting there across from him trying to talk to him, trying to make him talk to me, and then trying to think about other things when I couldn’t talk and couldn’t make him talk. I was moving through the time of our evening together as though I were pulling a weight along with me from one minute to the next. It didn’t seem to help that I was going to leave a few days later. I became so tired, then, feeling so little life between us, that out of the deepest boredom I proposed that we play a game: taking a piece of paper and passing it back and forth, we would make up a story together, each writing one sentence.

We did this, but the story was bad, or worse than bad: each sentence followed from the sentence before, but seemed arbitrary, clearly produced by boredom and anger, and this arbitrariness began to frighten me after a while, because it seemed to show how arbitrary other sentences were that followed from one another, and other stories, too. When we stopped trying to write it, there was even less life between us.

How strange it is to realize now that although I was frightened of the emptiness between us, that emptiness was not his fault but mine: I was waiting to see what he would give me, how he would entertain me. And yet I was incapable of being profoundly interested in him or, maybe, in anyone. Just the reverse of what I thought at the time, when it seemed so simple: he was too callow, or too cautious, or just too young, not complex enough yet, and so he did not entertain me, and it was his fault.

Another thing that bothered me more acutely now was the way I changed when I was with him, into a person I did not quite recognize, even though I told myself I did not have to be the same. I was only a little different with another woman, or with a man who was a friend, but with a man who was to me what he was to me, my constant companion, the one who shared my bed not just now and then but every night, the one I came back to when I was away, the one who came back to me, I would often play the part of a person I hardly recognized and usually did not like, and the more uncomfortable I was, the nastier this person became.

I wasn’t even playing a part, really, since I did not do it deliberately. And I didn’t really become a different person either. It was not a different person who appeared at these times but a side of myself that did not appear when I was alone or with other friends, one that was flippant, condescending, self-centered, sarcastic, and mean. To be all these things was quite natural to me, even though I did not like them.

* * *

During this time when I was often bored and restless, Madeleine was often angry, and I did not know why. It would begin early in the morning. Dawn would come with a band of milky white below a cloud. The sky would turn a cool, snowy blue. The first sounds would be a neighbor closing his gate, starting his car, and driving off. He awoke one bird who made a noise like a plucked wire and then went back to sleep for a while. I looked to see how much light was in the sky and the cat mewed once. Now the bird was awake again, and it made a noise like a cricket chirping.

Madeleine would begin banging around in the kitchen, and I would begin daydreaming. The palms would thrash. Later Madeleine would go outside and rake. I would lie on my bed indoors and hear the sound of the rake’s teeth grating over the dirt of the driveway. She was raking up the pine needles. She would work her way around the hummock of rubbery sea fig by the road and the bags of red clay sitting in plastic under the cedar tree. She would rake the needles into little piles all over, and then burn them. She liked making fires of them.

Morning would be warm and clear. Then, after noon, the fog would move slowly up the hill from the ocean, cars coming up out of it with their headlights on while the air was still clear where I was. Then the air near my windows would turn white, the trees at a distance become faint, and the bushes close to the house very distinct, suddenly, against the white fog.

At this time of the year there were monarch butterflies all over the hillside, in fives and sixes. Because it was close to Christmas, special services were conducted in the church down the hill, and organ music and singing came up to me. Listening to it, I would look out the bathroom window and see, over car tops and rooftops, the Santa on the chimney of a brick building down the hill, turning by electricity slowly one way and then the other.

Madeleine raked, and she slammed doors. She would pick up the receiver of the phone, which was just outside the door to my room, dial a number, and then slam the receiver down. Or there would be a gentle rattle as she picked the phone itself up and carried it out of my earshot, down the hall or around the corner into the kitchen, where she would talk in a hushed, angry voice, often in Spanish or Italian, the kitten mewing again and again in the background. Once, I know, she was angry at a friend of hers, a wealthy Spanish woman who lived at the top of our hill. I was sure Madeleine’s relationships with all her friends and lovers were complicated, but she never told me anything about them and I never asked.

She always preferred to eat with chopsticks, often a dish made with millet and garlic, and she drank many cups of tea during the day. The sink was often littered with chopsticks and teaspoons and separate scattered grains of millet and tea leaves, and in these days, because I knew how angry she was, even the chopsticks and the perforated, hinged metal spoons looked angry lying there in the pale green sink.

* * *

But despite my discouragement and impatience, I did not want to leave him when the time came for me to go East. It seemed true, just then, that he belonged to me and I belonged to him beyond any boredom, beyond any diminishing of feeling between us. At the same time, I did not know which to believe — that I had only a little feeling for him, as I seemed to have sometimes, or a great deal.

In the East, I was suddenly surrounded by so many difficulties and sorrows unrelated to him, unrelated even to me, that his importance shrank to something very small.

But when I thought my mind was altogether taken up with other things, as I stood on a railway station platform, waited by a car, entered or left a house, walked up or down a driveway, went out into the cold, went back in out of the cold, I would suddenly remember the sweet smell of his skin, and I would miss his open arms, how perfectly still he was when he opened his arms to me, as though all his attention was on me and on taking me into his arms, whereas with another man before him, and then another, there had been no room for me, they were all hard surface, they were always moving too quickly, rushing here and there, usually away from me, or past me, intent on their own business, only now and then straight toward me, when I, too, became their business. He paid attention, he watched, he listened, he thought about me when he was not with me, nothing was lost on him, nothing of me as he perceived me. Even in his sleep, he was attentive, and woke up enough to tell me he loved me, whereas other men, intent on the business of sleeping, would be disturbed and hiss at me: “Stop moving!”

* * *

I thought of combining the two visits East into one, in the novel, in order to be economical, since I don’t know how much he was involved in those days, if I was so far away from him. But even at a distance my feelings about him changed from day to day, either because each thing that happened to me, though it had nothing to do with him, changed the way I felt about him, and what happened during the night, too, in a dream, or because my feelings simply aged and developed, day after day, like independent creatures, grew in intensity or weakened, deteriorated, sickened, healed.

And the two visits were not the same. During the first, I stayed in my mother’s house, a difficult place for me to be, and he and I missed each other intensely and straightforwardly. He wrote at least four letters to me, and I wrote back to him, though I don’t know how many times. I telephoned him at least twice. By the time I went East for the second time, my mother’s sister had moved in with her and I stayed in a borrowed apartment in the city and felt that what he and I had together was almost over.

I see that I’m shifting the truth around a little, at certain points accidentally, but at others deliberately. I am rearranging what actually happened so that it is not only less confusing and more believable, but also more acceptable or palatable. If I now think I shouldn’t have had a certain feeling so early in the relationship, I move it to a later point in time. If I think I shouldn’t have had that feeling at all, I take it out. If he did something too dreadful to name, I either say nothing about it or describe it as dreadful without identifying it. If I did something too dreadful, I describe it in milder terms or do not mention it.

After all, there are things I like to remember and others I do not like to remember. I like to remember times when I behaved decently, also events that were exciting or interesting for another reason. I don’t like to remember times when I behaved badly, or ugliness of a drab sort, though I don’t mind a dramatic sort of ugliness. My boredom is unpleasant to remember, and so are certain events, like the visit he and I paid, after we were no longer together, to acquaintances of ours whom I did not like very much, in their ugly rented apartment, though for a long time I could not figure out why that particular visit was so unpleasant to remember.

* * *

One night, as I lay in bed in my mother’s house, I stopped to think about the hero of the book I was reading, who was good, innocent, handsome, intelligent, illiterate, gifted in music, and of noble but mysterious birth. I was reminded of him, not because they had many qualities in common, but because of the position the hero occupied in the story, and the attitude of the other characters toward him.

Close to midnight, I left my bed to call him. I carried the telephone into the kitchen and shut both doors. My mother was a light sleeper, often wakeful, and she would not close her bedroom door at night because she did not like to feel shut up in a room, and also, probably, because she liked to know as much as possible about what went on in her house. She therefore heard every noise, often thought a noise was unusual, wondered what it was as she continued to lie in her bed, or got up out of bed to see what it was. But there were nights when she was not worried about anything, when she slept soundly and did not hear what was happening in her house, and I thought there was a good chance, by now, that she was too deeply asleep to hear me.

I was sure he would be surprised and happy to hear my voice, but he was quiet and rather cool, no more than mildly polite. After we had talked for a short time we hung up, and I stayed there in the kitchen sitting on a stool, trying to reason out why he was not more affectionate. I began to accept my disappointment. Then the phone rang. He was calling back, apologetic. Now he was everything he had not been before, ardent and talkative. He said he was sorry, and explained that he was trying to accept the fact that I was away, and had been managing pretty well, and that to hear my voice on the phone and to have to talk to me was difficult because it unsettled him, it undid the work he had done. He went on to say that he loved me and missed me very much, so much that it was painful.

At this point, over his voice, I heard my mother’s footstep in the hall. The door from the hall opened, and my mother looked in. Her face in the full fluorescent light of the kitchen was swollen with sleep, disfigured, her eyes half shut against the light, her features disorganized. While I covered the mouthpiece of the receiver, as his tiny voice continued to talk on, unaware, away from my ear, she asked, “Is someone dead?”

* * *

By now, two letters had arrived from him. I read them over again and again, until the style in which they were written, impassioned and elegant at the same time, was so deeply impressed on me that when I myself wrote a letter to an old friend I found, as I wrote it, that I was writing in his style, and this felt like some sort of betrayal, though whether of him or my old friend I was not sure.

The distance made him seem even more silent, though in his two letters he might speak to me endlessly, as often as I read them and even when they only lay by my bed, unread but open.

A third letter arrived. I could tell it had been written a few days before, but it was dated a month earlier. He had these lapses, when his mind wandered, when he was not aware of the day and the hour or how the world outside worked, what schedule it worked to. At these times, he seemed to be looking away, and while he was looking away I could come closer to him than I could when he was fully conscious of the time and the place. And his lapses also seemed to be a proof of sincerity, because if he was not aware of the day of the week or the month, clearly he was not calculating all the moves he made, though he might be calculating some of them.

* * *

There are really only three things to include from that trip: my phone call to him, the letters he sent me, and my introduction to a certain man at a New Year’s Eve party. I kept the phone number this stranger wrote down for me, and I called him two months later when I was in the East again. I think I kept it not because I was unhappy with what I had already but for quite the opposite reason, that coming together with one man in such perfect harmony, for a while anyway, had made me think that anywhere I went now, I might meet another man and come together with him in perfect harmony. The party was attended mainly by college teachers I did not know in a village a hundred miles from the city in the midst of a cold so bitter that the slightest breeze burned my face.

* * *

When I came back, my mind was more on my work than it was on him. It held my interest for longer periods of time without any thought of him distracting me.

There were other changes. Madeleine was always changing. She was always discovering something about herself, or entering a state or leaving a state, or entering a discipline or leaving a discipline, or consulting a specialist, or finding a new medium in which to work, or a new process, or a new place to work, and from time to time a new relationship, though whether it was more than a passionate and tumultuous friendship I could never be sure.

Now she had cut her hair very short. It gave her pale, lined face a look of frightening severity. She had been seeing an acupuncturist who told her everything in her body was reversed — the yin things were yang, he said. I did not understand very well what this meant, but with Madeleine I did not try to understand if I did not immediately grasp what she said. Now I would like to understand better, now I would ask what this meant.

He and I quarreled again. For two nights in a row, Madeleine had asked me for a potato and baked it, and this was all she had for supper. The third night I was cooking a steak and he had brought a bottle of wine to have with it, which was unusual. Madeleine asked me if she could eat with us. I thought I could not say no. She was generally spare in the way she lived and ate, she had very little money, and also seemed to prefer a way of life in which she needed and used very little. But now and then she would join me in a feast or another extravagance and partake with high spirits and wit, as though she were returning to an earlier way of life. This evening she ate a large piece of steak and drank several glasses of wine. I enjoyed her company, but he was angry that she was eating with us.

The next morning I became angry at him in turn, about something else, something he and Madeleine had done at dinner, and we quarreled. As for Madeleine, she complained to me that she had had trouble digesting the food, that so much meat and wine were not good for her. She spoke out angrily against all meat-eaters and went on for some time without appearing to expect an answer from me.

Only a few days later, he and I quarreled again. I had read aloud to him a story I had written in which he appeared and he was pleased, but then I took him out of it before I read it aloud to other people and he was angry. He thought I was ashamed of him. I denied it. As we quarreled, we became increasingly angry. I was angrier than he was, maybe realizing that what he said was true, in a certain sense, and why it was true, though I hadn’t recognized it before. I wished it were not true, and I did not like him to point it out to me.

He left the house. I went to bed calm and angry and read a book, and a few hours after, he returned. He admitted later that he knew that staying away would have no effect on me, since I was too angry to care whether or not he stayed away, so he returned. Months later I put him back in the story in the same place he had been before, because I was sorry for what had happened. But by then he did not care anymore.

At some point during these days, maybe because he felt things between us were coming apart a little, he said we should get married. But since he could be almost certain I would refuse, his proposal did not seem sincere. Because it was sudden and even a little desperate, it seemed to mean only that he was trying to capture me, to keep me.

I think I made fun of him for it. But after he left me, I was the one who said I would marry him, if he wanted me to, and when that had no effect, when he resisted me, I went further, I offered more. I realized later that it was perfectly safe to say anything then, since nothing was possible. He seemed either insulted or ashamed for my sake, and impatient with me, as though I had belittled what he had once felt, and my own feelings, too. Now that I was willing, or said I was willing, to give him everything I had not been willing to give him before, he didn’t want anything from me. Or all he wanted was for me to leave him alone, and I couldn’t do that.

* * *

I was walking along a path surrounded only by cliffs, rocks, and sand — there were no plants of any kind. A young man ran past me, then stopped and turned back, disoriented and anguished, and told me that his home kept changing, so much that he could not recognize it. I woke up a little and realized that this was a dream, and went on dreaming. He and I entered a wooden house together. It was evidently his home. Then, even as we stood in it, it became the set for a play, and it changed each time the act changed, though I don’t remember what went on in this play, if anything went on.

* * *

We quarreled again, it must have been for the fifth time. That night he left me, angry, and then came back. He came back as though against his will, since he was still angry. The next night and for several days after that he did not come to me at all, and during that time I did not know where he was. I had told him something that shocked him. It did not shock me, because I was only saying to him what I had been thinking for some time, and it did not hurt me, because I was the one saying it. It only shocked me later, when I saw it differently, and saw how he would not have wanted to hear it. At the time I thought I could tell him anything I liked, quite openly, and he would be able to understand it and sympathize with it, as though he were not a separate person anymore but a part of me, so that he could feel what I felt along with me and not be more troubled by it than I was.

He was calm at first, after I said what I said that shocked him, but then he became angry and went away. He went away, and then came back later, still angry. He took sheets from the dryer and put them on the bed while I watched. He went to bed and fell asleep without saying anything.

He did not appear the next night and did not call me. I called his apartment, and there was no answer. I kept getting up out of bed to call him and then going back to bed and trying to read. I was surprised to find, however, that even though he had slept in my bed nearly every night since we had met, I felt I had immediately returned to what I had been before, alone at night, as though I had never met him.

Yet at the same time I was thinking of him so constantly, so much more constantly than I had when he was with me, and with such concentration, that he was extremely present in the room, coming between me and whatever else I tried to think about. I could see that I had betrayed him by feeling what I had felt and saying what I had said, but I could also think that such a betrayal produced a kind of faithfulness, because I had aroused such feelings of ardor and remorse in myself that I managed to achieve a passionate loyalty I had not achieved before. So there I lay, alone, as though I would always be alone, but also strangely in his presence.

I was afraid to turn off the light, though it was past one in the morning, and then two, and then three. As long as the light burned next to me and I held a book in front of me and read the page now and then, I was safe, I was distracted from certain thoughts. The worst thought was that he might have gone to someone else out of revenge, and I could not avoid that thought for long before it came back to me. And this turned out to be what he had done, I found out later.

I knew it was not fair to believe I could do what I liked and he could not, that I could have a certain feeling for another man and he could not go to another woman, but I never decided anything according to what was fair, or maybe never decided anything in the first place but allowed myself to be pulled in one direction or another by what I wanted just at that moment.

Early in the morning, after I had been asleep a short time, I dreamed I heard his step on the terrace outside. In my dream the dog whined and he said to her gently: “Is she here?”

But he had not come by the time I woke up. Later in the day Madeleine and I went down the block to the corner café and sat at a table outside studying Italian together. We went through the lesson slowly because we were both distracted: I was watching out for him, and Madeleine was convinced that two people standing at a nearby corner were talking about her. She kept looking over her shoulder at them and mumbling, so that I, as I tried to take dictation from her, couldn’t hear very well. After a while we stopped trying to work and just sat there in the sunlight.

Waiting for him again that night, when he would not come, created a dark space like a large room, a room that opened into the night from my room and filled it with dark draughts of air. Because I did not know where he was, the city seemed larger, and seemed to come right into my room: he was in some place, and that place, though unknown to me, was present in my mind and was a large dark thing inside me. And that place, that strange room where he was, where I imagined him to be, with another person, became part of him, too, as I imagined him, so that he was changed, he contained that strange room and I contained it, too, because I contained him in that room and that room in him.

Because he was so absent, and in doubt, having disappeared without a word, without the connection of a plan, a day or hour when we would see each other again, the only way I could keep him near me was by the strength of my will, summoning all of him to me and holding him there moment by moment, so that now all of him seemed present to me, whereas at other times only a part of him was present. And in the same way that the smell of him would hang in my nostrils when he was with me, now an essence of him filled me, a savor of him that was more than his smell or taste, a distillation of the whole of him permeated me or floated inside me.

He was doing this to me. I felt it very much coming from him against me. But the very strength of it, the very force of it, was also the force of how much he loved me, and I felt that, too, so that in the extreme force of the harm I felt from him, I felt his love, too. And the longer he stayed away from me, the more strongly I felt how much he loved me, and the more strongly I believed I loved him.

I couldn’t stop listening to the sounds of cars, waiting to hear the sound of his. I paid attention to the sound of each car as though it were a voice.

After two days of this, his absence had gone on so long that I was falling into a trance with it and the tension was going out of it. I no longer had to hold it in my mind or sustain it; it had grown so large that it surrounded me and sustained me now, and I rested in it.

Out driving in my own car, I tried to decide what I could be sure of and what I didn’t know. I said aloud to myself: I don’t know where he is. But he is somewhere. He is alive. Either he is alone or he is with another person, a man or a woman. If he’s with a woman, either he will stay with her or he won’t. If he has spent a night with her, that is one thing. If he also stays on through the next morning, and stays on into the next night, that is another thing.

I reached this point in seeing what I knew and didn’t know, and then went back to telling myself the least I knew, that he was alive somewhere, in his skin, sitting, lying down, standing, walking. I knew he had color, had warmth, moved ceaselessly, even if with small motions, and yet he was beyond the range of where I could see him. But I was thinking so hard about him I was sure I should be able to see him wherever he was.

The way it ended was not the way I thought it would. I did not hear the sound of his car grow louder and louder with an awful, frightening loudness until it drew up next to the house, and I did not call him until at last he picked up the phone. I can remember only two things about how he came back. One was that he parked his car at the bottom of my street, whether I heard it or not, and the other was that when we came face to face again, we were meeting in the bar down the hill, on the back terrace, and I had waited for him a long time, listening to a conversation about Australia that continued beyond any interest — whether the people all spoke English there, what they drank there, the population of Sydney.

I don’t remember what we talked about on the terrace at the back of the bar, though I must have apologized, and we must have agreed on something and we must have decided something together, but I do remember lying awake later that night, with the light on, watching him sleep.

He had fallen asleep with his back to me, his broad white shoulder outside the sheet. I lay next to him, raised on one elbow, and looked at all of him that I could see, every detail, and especially his head, especially his pale forehead, the side of it that I could see, since it was turned away from me, and especially his hair, which was close to the light, right under the lamp. I looked at it, then I touched it, and he was not disturbed. His hair was straight and not long, thin over his forehead and thicker in back, a light reddish-brown with blond streaks in it. I looked hard at the color of it and touched it again. Although I knew it did not matter what color his hair was, that night everything about him seemed important to me. I thought I loved that hair and the color of it, and it seemed to me that everything about him had to be the way it was, and could not have been any other way.

Then, in his sleep, he murmured something. I leaned over and asked him what he had said, though I thought he would only go on sleeping. But he said the same thing again, a purely gentle and loving thing.

I got up, finally, at two in the morning and made some warm milk for myself, and sat smoking a cigarette in the kitchen. I thought about what I had just been thinking about his hair, that he was with me now, even more so because he was asleep and I was awake, but if he left me again, or if I left him, and we stayed apart, he would still have hair of a light reddish-brown color with a few blond streaks in it, and I would know exactly, closely, the particular way his hair looked, and would still have that, so that a part of him would still belong to me and there would be nothing he could do about it.

The fact that he came back to me after leaving me, that time, may have made me think that no matter what I said, no matter what I did, and no matter how long he stayed away from me, he would always come back to me, and that I did not have to love him very deeply, or considerately, for him to go on loving me.

* * *

The noise of traffic is becoming heavy, a constant din above the sound of the rain, the tires hissing on the wet road surface, and this tells me that four o’clock has come and maybe even gone and I will have to stop work soon.

The cars are right under my window. The road is one of the main routes for traffic going north and south along this side of the river. Many heavy trucks go by, shaking the ground. The heaviest even shake me up here in my chair. Now and then whole houses go by.

Vincent and I bought this place despite the road, because we liked the back yard so much, with its grapevines and raspberry patches, pear trees and lilacs, shagbark hickories and other trees and flowering shrubs. Then we began trying to block out the noise of the traffic. I would look down from my window and see Vincent standing in the front yard and I knew he was trying to figure out where the worst of the noise came in. I would join him and we would talk about the noise. We talked about the noise a great deal, how it was reflected off hard surfaces and how it was best absorbed. Vincent built a fence inside the hedge along the front of the property. Then we planted a line of arborvitae inside the fence. Some of the noise seemed to be coming in under the fence, so we moved dirt from other parts of the yard to pile up against the base of the fence. Then Vincent extended the fence around the sides of the property, and we planted some hemlocks inside the line of arborvitae. A neighbor offered us a young pine from his yard and though it is only a foot high we have put it in among the hemlocks. Now we are thinking that we can further shield the back yard if we build a room off the side of the house at an angle.

At times I am not just nervous about this work but frightened, and think I am going through a crisis, one that could be called existential. Then I realize the problem is much simpler — I have had no breakfast and too much coffee, and my nerves are raw, so tender that I am almost unbearably disturbed to look out the window and see a truck carrying one car on its back and pulling another behind it.

But at other times I am really confused and uncomfortable. For instance, I am trying to separate out a few pages to add to the novel and I want to put them together in one box, but I’m not sure how to label the box. I would like to write on it MATERIAL READY TO BE USED, but if I do that it may bring me bad luck, because the material may not really be “ready.” I thought of adding parentheses and writing MATERIAL (READY) TO BE USED, but the word “ready” was still too strong despite the parentheses. I thought of throwing in a question mark so that it read MATERIAL (READY?) TO BE USED but the question mark immediately introduced more doubt than I could stand. The best possibility may be MATERIAL — TO BE USED, which does not go so far as to say that it is ready but only that in some form it will be used, though it does not have to be used, even if it is good enough to use.

Sometimes I think that if only I could go away for a while my mind would be clearer and I could work better. I spoke to a friend the other night who said he had gone away for two weeks to a colony in the mountains to work on his novel and had just come back. He wrote eighty pages in those two weeks. I have never written eighty pages in two weeks. He said that he worked all day long and after dinner, too. He said other people there would leave their rooms and go for walks, even two or three times a day. He said it was pretty quiet. A man down the hall from him played exercise tapes and did exercises, but this did not really bother him. He said the food was not very good. It was plain American food. At first it seemed good enough, but after a while it became hard to eat. For instance, they served ham in very thick pieces, almost an inch thick, and after a few bites he would feel sick. He learned to eat very little at dinner and more at the other meals, which were better. I asked him many questions about this place because I was thinking I should try to go away somewhere to work on my novel, even though I went away once and it didn’t make any difference.

I was living alone in the city then. I was given a grant and I used part of the money to pay the overdraft on my bank account. I used more to rent a cottage for the summer. After stocking the cottage with food and repairing my car, I had almost nothing left of the grant, though I had received the money only two weeks before.

The cottage was one of a cluster of small summer bungalows built about sixty years earlier by a German woman named Mary and her husband. The doorways of the cottage were odd sizes, the ceilings and walls bulged, nail heads showed everywhere, the linoleum on the floors bent up at the edges, and mushrooms grew out of the bathroom floor next to the shower stall with its platform of wooden slats. Mary’s husband had died and after a few years she had sold the property to one of the summer tenants, another woman named Mary, whose husband then died also. A bench was erected in his memory halfway down the path to the lake. It was unveiled just before I rented my cottage.

It was very peaceful there. Most of the other tenants were about thirty years older than I was, which made me feel young and energetic. When I went down to the weedy lake to swim in the middle of the day, I always seemed to meet old women I hadn’t met before walking firmly but slowly up and down the steep path, or resting on the bench halfway down, or unfolding deck chairs on the warm, warped boards of the dock with its hovering wasps. Almost everyone I met seemed to be named Ruth, or if not Ruth, then Mary. Some were the sisters of other women named Ruth or Mary, or the sisters-in-law. Some had their husbands with them. I worked well there in my cottage, but did not do as much as I had thought I would.

A year later, after I met Vincent, I left the city often to visit him. Again, I thought that away from the city I would have the peace and quiet I needed to work on my novel. I even thought the bus would be a good place to work. On the way out of the city, in the early evening, the other passengers were often tired and cross, and when they were cross they were usually quiet. There would be conflicts at the beginning of the ride, when everyone was getting settled, a woman might put her wet umbrella on top of a man’s luggage, but then they would quiet down. I would stuff kleenex in my ears and tie a kerchief around my head so that I could concentrate better. If I looked down at my page I did not have to think about anything but the work I was doing. If I looked up I could stop thinking about my work and watch the other passengers. But although I wrote a few short things on the bus, it was not a good place to write anything long.

* * *

When I wrote down what happened during the fifth quarrel he and I had, I left out what he said when I was watching him sleep. I said it was a gentle and loving thing, but I did not say what his actual words were. He said, “You’re so beautiful.” But now I don’t think it was gentle and loving, after all. I think it was a cry of frustration. He knew he was more helpless than he wanted to be, that if he hadn’t found me so beautiful he could have worked his way free of me, as he knew he should. In the end, he did get free of me, but it took longer, and I had to hurt him more often than if he had not been tied to me by what he saw as my beauty.